Kick start

Smoke billowed from exploded bombs, one lakh people screamed hysterically, newspapers burned in the dusk, young men hurdled the barbed wire and dodged police cordons. A riot? No, just East Bengal versus Mohun Bagan. They said Calcutta soccer was dead, that the Big Match was passe. Perhaps it is. But for one fine romantic day, time rewound.

When East Bengal and Mohun Bagan faced off in the Federation Cup semi-finals last week, something extraordinary occurred. A city and a sport rediscovered each other and Calcutta and soccer were locked again in a bizarre tango.

A meeting of the Big Two was never just a match, not even just a rivalry. It was, to paraphrase what Liverpool coach Bill Shankly once said, "not even a matter of life and death. It is much more". But declining standards on the Calcutta Maidan and a disinterested public, had changed all that. Still, for a moment - who knows why - a culture revived.

Paras (localities) hummed with gossip, supporters grimly hung around their respective camps, local newspapers played coach against coach and when the police lathi charged fans buying tickets in the rain, all seemed back in place.

Even an excitable All India Football Federation, forgetting temporarily that it had an exclusive tie-up with Star Sports, allowed Doordarshan to walk in and telecast the match live because Star wasn't. Eventually East Bengal won 4-1 (including a Baichung Bhutia hat-trick) but the result was not as important as the images the week threw up. It was the '60s and '70s revisited: it was mayhem, it was stirring.

Mohun Bagan "Diamond" Formation

It was also madness. The coaches, whose reputations hover between genius and cretin depending on how a match plays out, rose gallantly to the occasion. Out-talking East Bengal's P.K. Banerjee, who at his finest moments sounds like a stuck machine gun, is never easy.

But Mohun Bagan's Amal Dutta riveted the media with complicated talk about his "diamond" formation. It appeared a style adapted from Holland's free-flowing method, but at least it sounded original.

Was Banerjee silenced? Does it snow in the Sahara? Undaunted, he lectured on about using the "Catenaccio" style, which in turn sounded like some exotic cousin of Cappucino, but is actually the super-defensive style the Italians use.

Ah, soccer in Calcutta without fist-waving, trash-talking coaches is like John McEnroe kissing linesmen at Wimbledon. And just to show there were no hard feelings, when Dutta lost the match, he accused Banerjee of doping his players. The war goes on.

But would this love affair endure? Alas, the romance appeared uncertain. Said Banerjee: "This craze seems temporary, but as the standard improves, the old magic is bound to return." But even he, walking around with hope in his pocket, knows all evidence runs to the contrary.

The game in Calcutta has been in a coma for long. Like a child discarding an old, wind-up toy in search of fresh excitement, the city's middle class which once drove the game had turned their backs on it. So what if the players were paid better, the sport lacked sophistication. It had become, says Banerjee, "a downmarket game".

Little by little the edifice was kicked away. The Big Matches were shifted to the out-of-the-way Salt Lake Stadium on the eastern fringes of the city. Even the snarling rivalry, which often journeyed from mere insults into violence at the mildest of incompetence by referees, found its edge dulled.

Gone are the days when an East Bengal fan had to be of refugee descent from the erstwhile East Pakistan and his rival rooted in Calcutta. Two generations of cross-marriages have almost evaporated this kind of ethnic loyalty.

"Rarely are hilsas strung up by Mohun Bagan fans celebrating a victory over the archrivals. With players from Nagaland to Kerala (not to mention an influx from Africa) relegating local boys to the minority, fans are discovering new attachments," says Sudhindranath Mukherjee, a Calcutta University reader.

East Bengal Super Defensive Losers: coach Amal Dutta with Chima Okerie

But the unkindest cut, the shot through the head, was when the World Cup matches - see Maradona's power, watch Zico's grace - began to be televised live since 1982. "People realised how inferior our standards are," says Banerjee, earning him immediately any award for understatement.

Quite simply, the Maidan heroes now looked like pygmies at an Olympic high jump competition. India was not even ranked in the top 100 soccer nations of the world. Now in Calcutta people were figuring out why.

But all can never be lost. Games never die, they merely get ignored. And Calcutta soccer is offering its faithful some crumbs of hope. Corporate sponsorship, oxygen to any sport today, is improving. Teams actually sport logos of companies on their jerseys.

Mohun Bagan even giving up a 119-year-old tradition and dropping its dull jerseys in favour of a more "telegenic" design, on a request from ESPN. Bagan is also flirting with the idea of converting its members into shareholders and transforming itself into a public limited company.

Finally the club has realised that by marketing tumblers and T-shirts emblazoned with the club's motif, money can be made. The televising of matches is helping too, for it has massaged egos. Banerjee believes that players, aware of their larger audience, have improved their standard.

For once Dutta agrees: "They are now jumping higher, showing more deft in sliding tackles and are running about much more." They are even, like Bhutia, scoring hat-tricks.

But hat-tricks come rarely (it was the first ever in a Big Match). It makes you wonder then if this wasn't just one lucky day. That the magic of Calcutta soccer, of East Bengal versus Mohun Bagan, of over 1.2 lakh people insane with excitement, was just a passing moment of wonderful monsoon madness. Calcuttans, indeed most Indians who have ever kicked a football, hope that is not true.