A disgraced hockey player coaches the national women’s team to victory in a 2007 movie that’ll make you forget all about Ted Lasso.
In the wake of Ted Lasso’s glorious Emmy win, it’s easy to see that the beloved Apple TV Plus show has stirred our collective love for an inspirational, underdog sports story. But for those who have finished the latest season, or simply want more of the heartwarming on-the-pitch action and off-the-pitch drama that made Ted Lasso such a success, they need look no further than Chak De! India. Chak De! India ( Let’s Go! India in translation) is a 2007 movie about the national women’s hockey team of India, as a disgraced former hockey player – played by Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan, often known simply as SRK – coaches the ragtag band of athletes to global victory. Inspired by the Indian women’s team’s 2002 win at the Commonwealth games, it’s a story with the usual ups and downs of inspirational sports movies: bickering teammates, last-minute funding dropouts, and the tension of matches decided by a single penalty shot. The similarities to Ted Lasso are often striking, even if Chak De! India released over a decade earlier. The corralling of arguing teammates, the tensions that move seamlessly between locker rooms and on-pitch passes, as well as the light tone that keeps a – still largely serious – sports drama from feeling too weighed down by the ambitions and obstacles the athletes face. There’s even a precursor to Ted Lasso season 2’s ‘Led Tasso’ scene, where Jason Suidekis inverts his usual charm to become a bully, giving the players a common enemy to unite against. But Chak De! is still a film all of its own, and it can be a disservice to dissect it too much through the lens of a contemporary (and American-British) production, rather than on its own terms.
