As the city gears up to host Vini Jr & Co for tomorrow’s friendly, stars of India’s golden era talk of a lifelong romance ignited by match reports and the odd footageFrom Argentine greats Diego Maradona and Lionel Messi to Germany’s Oliver Kahn, Kolkata has hosted some of football’s greatest icons down the years. Yet, the city holds a special place for Brazil, a love affair that began with its first breakout stars and is now set to only deepen when Vinicius Jr and his teammates arrive for the friendly they play against India on Saturday at Salt Lake Stadium.Coach Carlo Ancelotti’s boys are ranked No.6 in world football. India are a distant No.138. Some veterans have commented on the audacity of a lowly-ranked side taking on one of the giants of the game, but when Brazil first captured the imagination of football fans in India, it had more to do with a sense of kinship than purely adulation.Dreaming without visualsBrazil’s rise coincided with India’s emergence as the superpower of Asian football, a golden era — notwithstanding the missed chance of taking part in the 1950 World Cup in Brazil — marked by triumphs at two Asian Games (1951, 1962) and a fourth-placed finish at the 1956 Olympics. As Brazil shook up football with its working-class, mixed-race team playing a unique brand of free-flowing football, India turned to it for inspiration.
“During our time, we only wanted to play like Brazil. Because they were the No.1 team and we also wanted to be No.1,” former footballer Shyam Thapa told TOI. “We used to read a lot about Brazil in newspapers and were instantly drawn to this image of a team that might be economically poor like us but had the gift to conjure magic on the field and boss over European elites,” recalls Thapa.This was before the era of live telecast and highlight shows, with imagination filling in the details that reports could not convey. “Remember those were pre-TV days and we didn’t have the opportunity to watch Brazil live. So, we used to visualise their football magic in our own way. When Chuni-da dribbled past with one of his famous body feints, we would marvel at the move, saying it would make even Garrincha proud,” says Gautam Sarkar, a star footballer of the 1970s, referring to Indian legend Chuni Goswami and the Brazilian master considered to be among the greatest dribblers of the game.“In my mind, I discovered my Brazil through Kajol Mukherjee’s control and touch, Bengal Nagpur Railway star Rajendra Mohan’s running with and without the ball and, later, in Surajit Sengupta’s artistry,” adds Sarkar.But it wouldn’t be long before Kolkata found it could put faces to the names that set the city’s football pulse racing.
Coach Datta’s ProjectorAmal Datta’s career as a footballer never matched the ripples he would later create in his coaching avatar. Giving up his playing career prematurely to travel to England for a one-year FA coaching course, he returned in 1960 with a certificate that made him India’s first professional coach. In his luggage was a projector and grainy video clips that would give many in the city their first glimpse of Pele, Garrincha, Didi, Vava and Zagallo en route to winning the 1958 and 1962 World Cup finals.“Amal-da’s clippings on the projector screen became an absolute craze in the city during the 1960s. He also used to tell the audience to focus on and study the Brazilians’ movements on and off the ball,” recalls Sarkar.Then, in the 70s, came the documentary called, ‘Giants of Brazil’. “When it was screened for the first time at Lighthouse cinema, it resonated profoundly with the public,” says Gautam Roy, a football statistician. “Reading about Brazilian football and their artistes in newspapers and magazines was the sole source for firing our imagination. But seeing the documentary just drove up the craze,” he adds, noting how the hype would go on to hit stratospheric levels during Pele’s 1977 visit.Pele Comes CallingWhen Pele and his New York Cosmos club came calling, two of India’s top club sides presented a picture of contrasts. For Mohun Bagan, the club synonymous with awakenings of national pride, those were turbulent times. Their city rivals, East Bengal, had emerged as the undisputed rulers of Indian football and were still basking in the glow of their 5-0 thrashing of Bagan in the IFA Shield final of 1975.But, in 1976, Bagan general secretary Dhiren Dey pulled off a coup by snatching a host of players from East Bengal. It was around the same time that he learnt of Cosmos’s proposed tour of Asia. He quickly chalked out a plan to cash in on the visit. “I had already committed myself to East Bengal when he (Dey) proposed that I play for Bagan and grab the opportunity of taking the field against Pele. It was an offer too tempting for me to ignore,” says Shyam Thapa, who scored in the 2-2 tie against Cosmos at Eden Gardens on Sept 24, 1977.
Share your thoughts in the comments
Be respectful · TOI community guidelines
Saturday’s friendly comes at that time of the year when a sense of festivity drifts into Bengal’s air. As Kolkata gears up for Durga Puja, it will also look to embellish a deep bond that beats as part of its footballing heart. For both Sarkar and Thapa, the arrival of the Brazil team is like the journey coming full circle. Whatever the result, they know nothing can take away the bragging rights won nearly 50 years back: “the pride of playing against Pele”.
