The day the football died

No, it did not happen in a day. The death has been a slow one. And no, globally the game of football is not dead in most places. It is doing better than ever. Alive and kicking. But Bengal's football and Bengali passion about it died in the eighties. An eyewitness account of that tragic death follows.

I am not quite sure what the opening scene of my nostalgic Bengali football film will be, but the soundtrack will definitely have the line: Mohun Bagan maatth theke Ajay Basu bolchhi (Ajay Basu speaking from Mohun Bagan football ground) somewhere in it. Even today that one line uttered in a resonant voice on Calcutta A station (Medium Wave: Frequency 657, Meters 456.6) from those pre-DoorDarsharn days evokes a lot of happy memories of excitement and apprehension. Even after DoorDarshan, with a logo
that uncannily resembles a football, had started broadcasting the major football matches and some friendly kid's rich dad had finally managed to purchase the first Sonodyne B&W TV set of the neighborhood, one had to fall back to good old All India Radio for the minor matches. That one line would also reveal everything you ever needed to know about a Bengali: religion (hint: not Mohammedan Sporting Club ground), on which side of a fateful 2216 kms line their grandparents grew up (hint: not East Bengal ground) and consequently the most important bit - their epicurean preferences. Life was simple back then. Bengali families with both ghoti and bangal members were not unheard of, but the frequency of such anomalies was as greatly exaggerated as reports of Mark Twain's death were. However, the reports of manslaughter and suicides in those hybrid families during and after a Mohun Bagan-East Bengal match were entirely accurate.

Calcutta football was not just about the three big clubs. Clubs like Aryans, George Telegraph, Eastern Railways, Port Trust, Tollygunge Agragami and Bally Protibha played a very important role in a vibrant football scene: grooming budding talent, providing jobs to footballers and coaches, stimulating fan following in villages, small towns and offices and snatching those occasional but all-important points from the big three. The Mohun Bagan-East Bengal League match, however, was the D-day - the unofficial final match in a round robin Calcutta League of twenty-odd teams. Quite often both of them would make it to the finals of national knockout tournaments like IFA Shield, Durand Cup, Rovers Cup and Federation Cup as well. Those were the days when streets of West Bengal suburbs and villages would be empty and stores would drop shutters hours before the match started. Flags were bought and Abir leftovers from Dol (Holi) were dug out in eager anticipation. During the match, one could hear the commentary in any part of a town even when they were not carrying a radio with them. In those pre-Jubo-Bharati-Krirangan days in Calcutta, more people would gather outside the Mohun Bagan and East Bengal Maidan grounds than what could fit inside the stadium. With pocket radios turned on at full volume and held right next to their eardrums, they would excitedly wait for those four magic letters: g-o-a-l. Which side scored that illusive goal would determine the price of Ilish and Chingri maachh for next several days. As George Bernard Shaw wisely noted, a Ghoti and his Fish are intricately tied. For me, a die-hard Mohun Bagan supporter but a closet Ilish fan, a Mohun Bagan victory brought with it the sweet bonus of Ganga's fresh Ilish at a bargain price.


Folklores of barefoot Mohun Bagan's incredible 1911 IFA shield triumph against the goras, exploits of Samad and Gostho Paul, legendary Mohammedan Sporting team of 1930s, FIFA's refusal to let barefoot Indian team take part in 1950 world cup, India's 1951 Asian Games gold, magic (I mean atrocities) of East Bengal's Panchapandab - Ahmed Khan, Venkatesh, Saleh, AppaRao and Dhanraj - in fifties and Shailen Manna's resolute defense against them, Chuni Goswami's brilliance in sixties, P K Banerjee-Chuni Goswami-Balaram-Journal Singh inspired Asian Games gold in 1962, the creditable fourth place finish in 1956 Olympics and Neville DeSouza's hat-trick, the bronze in 1970 Asiad aroused not only passion, but also a sense of pride and nationalism. Bengali fiction and non-fiction writing by the likes of amazingly gifted Moti Nandy in magazines like Khela, Khelar Asar, and Anandamela reinforced those folklores.

Unfortunately it all slowly fell apart in the eighties. It started with the live broadcast of world cup football and the introduction of Jawharlal Nehru Gold Cup . 1982 was the first world cup broadcast live by DoorDarshan and, in the middle of enjoying Zico's brilliance, Maradona's promise of future greatness, Rossi's opportunism and an epic France-West Germany semifinal - dawned a painfully sad realization: there was a very wide gulf between Calcutta Maidan and the best of world football. The reality was driven home more directly and ruthlessly in the Jawharlal Nehru Gold cup invitational tournament which also started in 1982. Studded with world-cupper studs like Buruchaga, Lazslo Kiss, Fischer, Mikhailichenko, Smolarek, Ramos - honored by a very respectful (WC) next to their names on DoorDarshan screens - those teams started to pummel our gods mercilessly. All of a sudden Bidesh Bose's run on the left wing, Surojit Sengupta's body swerves and the crosses from the right wing, Krishanu Dey's dribbles, Sishir Ghosh's headers and Prasun Banerjee's left-footed free-kicks lost their magic. And a year later, on the same Sonodyne set, we watched eleven Indians performing a new magic at Lord's and suddenly transforming a leisurely game of rich and elitist Indians into a national obsession. The world of Calcutta football was never quite the same again.

"To think of football as merely 22 hirelings kicking a ball is merely to say that a violin is wood and cat-gut, Hamlet so much ink and paper. It is conflict and art." - JB Priestly

True, but it is a game too - with a winner and a loser. It is not possible to get excited and passionate about a team that always loses, loses big and while losing, does not even look like playing the same game as the best in the business is playing. A Bengali did not have to shun his Ray and Ghatak when he discovered Truffaut and Buñuel. He could effortlessly switch between his Tagore and Eliot. But after watching the World Cup, Jawharlal Nehru Gold cup and Indian one-day cricket triumphs on the screens of DoorDarshan, he could never again find the same passion about football.

No, Baichung Bhutiya's brief stint at a third-tier Manchester Bury does not redeem anything. Any Mohun Bagani worth his salt knows that Chuni Goswami had an offer from Tottenham Hotspur in the 60s. He refused because Mohun Bagan back then was much stronger than the Spurs :-) and in Calcutta he was treated like a god - a god mightier than even the great Uttam Kumar. He was also a decent Ranji player, but never wanted to improve his cricket and make it to the national side because cricket was not important enough. So after breaking his knee while playing football, when a certain teenager decided to switch to cricket in late eighties - it was not only the best career move by a Bengali since Michael Madhusudan and Bankim Chandra gave up writing in English, it also epitomized the end of an era.