Where’s Dhorasoo Now?

We talked a lot about Vikash Dhorasoo during the January transfer period, when everybody, but everybody was interested in our guy Vikash. The reason again, was that he’d been fired by PSG, leading to free agent status, leading to no transfer fee, leading to… Well, let’s just say that our Vikash was one popular guy.

Alas, all for naught. Even though at least six teams expressed interest — including Bolton, Fulham (with whom he had a trial), Lyon (kind of) and even Parma, which tried to do a deal on January 31 — our Vikash is still without club. Fulham’s only response to Dhorasoo questions after the trial? “He trained with us last week, but we will not be taking it any further.”

Well, then. I guess that’s that.

As the January stuff was happening, Vikash was also preparing for the public debut of his film, “The Substitute,” which he filmed during the World Cup, when he played all of sixteen minutes for France. In January he said, “The film saved my pride…Without this film, I believe that after the World cup, I would perhaps not have wanted of play football again…Whereas now, I think that it is necessary that I play again when the film comes out, that I am still a footballer by trade.“

Still a footballer by trade. Oh, ouch. Things like this make me want to say, “Vikash! Sweetie! Can you man up just a bit? Because your intense vulnerability is giving me a ferocious pain in my maternal area!”

The thing is, though? The film is getting good reviews. It even won the “prix du film français” at the November film festival at Belfort. And one of the reasons is apparently Vikash’s intense and painful vulnerability.

From one review:

“Melancholy instead of euphoria, loneliness instead of “one-for-all-and-all-for-one”rhetoric, a tragic hero instead of a glorious athlete - Substitute is the other documentary football film. What begins as a World Cup adventure, full of hope, turns into the diary of a bitter disappointment. The father (trainer Domenech) rejects the son (Dhorasoo) who is worn down by the waiting, the boredom, and the self-doubt. Sixteen minutes on the field are too little to give him a sense of belonging. And even literature (Stefan Zweig, Fred Vargas, Jonathan Coe) and Neil Young’s “Helpless” only help to a certain degree. Fortunately, there’s the camera: if he can’t play football, at least he can film! The medium of super-8 turns the gigantic event into a colorful, shaky, blurry, charming spectacle. A German hit song from the seventies gets the last word: “Later, that might be too late for me.”

So I guess vulnerable expressions of pain actually worked here. So more power to our Vikash.

I dunno, though. Part of me really wants to see the film, and part of me would prefer multiple root canals. Less excruciating.

But I’m still wishing Vikash all the best with the film and the rest of his life.