There was once a cricket match being played in Kolkata. The ground was a fairly big one with a cement pitch right outside the boundary line, on which a cricket coaching centre's players usually practised. This pitch was just 22 yards long and 10 feet wide. Yet, on it — while 13 men battled it out on the ground with bat and ball, wearing expensive pads and gloves — four children who'd just finished school were knocking an empty nariyal shell around. They were, in effect, playing football. The coconut was the ball. The pitch was the ground. Its two ends were the goals. The longer sides were the touchlines. And that's all that the kids needed to have such a good time that they were laughing uncontrollably as they had their kick-about.

It's things like this that make football "the beautiful game". Anyone — rich or poor — can play it because you don't require costly racquets or golf clubs, for example. No wonder it's the world's most popular sport, and a new podcast launched yesterday celebrates that fact by disseminating news, dissecting strategies and dishing out trivia, apart from discussing other facets of football. The show is called Football Shootball, and was strategically released days before the start of a new English Premier League season. Gaurav Sapre, Sivaram Parmeswaran and Karthik Iyer are the three people hosting it. They are friends who used to spend a lot of their time conversing about their passion for the sport. So one day, after mulling the idea of starting a podcast for a while, they recorded a general conversation they were having on football on their phones, and that's what gave them the confidence to take a leap of faith with this show.