B’wood plays ball for charity

B’wood plays ball for charity
New entrants Sidharth Malhotra and Kartik Aaryan are prepping for a series of matches.

Two years after Abhishek Bachchan and Ranbir Kapoor came on board Bunty Walia’s charitable football initiative, which brought together Bollywood and TV actors, along with sportsmen, to encourage the sport in India, the team is now prepping up for a three-match tournament in Delhi, Lucknow and Dehradun, which will kick off on June 4, followed by an international charity tour. The team is set to play one match each in Qatar, Singapore, Dubai and the UK. Government officials and local sports teams in each country will play for charity against the Indian celebs to raise funds for different causes.

The team, captained by Jr Bachchan also includes Arjun Kapoor, Aditya Roy Kapur, Dino Morea, Shabbir Ahluwalia, Karan Wahi, Armaan Jain, Marc Robinson, Sachiin Joshi, Raj Kundra, Caesar Gonzalves and Shoojit Sircar who have been practising every Sunday at a Bandra school ground. Mirror has learnt that the star quotient has just gone up with Sidharth Malhotra and Kartik Aaryan signing up for the football initiative last week.

“The main objective of the All Stars Football Club (ASFC) is to raise money for noble causes. We play 90-minute matches once a week with a ‘no wives or girlfriends on the field’ policy in place,” jokes the owner-founder, admitting that it was Abhishek’s love for the sport and the immediate thumbs-up from several others, for reasons ranging from philanthropy to fitness, that set the ball rolling. “Sidharth wanted to play a couple of trial matches before he came on board officially. After three Sundays, he was game too.”

With the summer sun blazing, the actors didn’t want to get all tanned, and disrupt continuity in their films, so the practice timings have changed to 6 pm and they will be playing under floodlights at an adjacent ground from this Sunday. Last year, the Bollywood boys had sparred with the Boys in Blue, led by Virat Kohli’s ‘All Hearts Football Club’, at a packed Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium, in the capital. The actors lost 4-3 to the cricketers but this only encouraged them further. In the last six months, they’ve also taken on TV actors, IPL cricketers, the Mumbai police and a team of businessmen in Surat.