Slow motion football in the maidans of Calcutta

Before cable television came to India in general and West Bengal in particular, footballers who played in Calcutta used to be big stars. From the days of Chuni Goswami and PK Banerjee in the sixties to the days of Bikash Panji and Chima Okorie in the late eighties and early nineties, footballers had their following.

Of course, once European football came into Indian homes, people realised what they were used to watching was not football, but football in slow-motion.

Moti Nandi’s Striker Stopper is a book of two novellas (Striker and Stopper) set in the maidans of Calcutta (as it was then called) during the days of football in slow-motion. Both the novellas originally appeared in Bangla in 1973 and 1974 and have been translated competently by Arunava Sinha.

Striker tells the story of young Prasoon Bhattacharya, who, as the title suggests, is trying to make it big as a striker in Calcutta football. Prasoon belongs to a lower middle class family which has great difficulty in making ends meet. His father, a one-time great of the Calcutta league, works for a chemist and has spent much of his life being harassed and humiliated after being accused of throwing a match.

Prasoon has to battle all this, along with the machinations of people who run Calcutta football. How he triumphs in the end forms the major part of the story.

Stopper is the story of Kamal Guha, who has spent more than two decades playing for various clubs across the Calcutta league. Lesser footballers played for India and he could not because he would not fall in line with the shenanigans of some football administrators. He has reached a stage where he did not feel the need to prove himself to anyone, except maybe to his son and himself.

His son hates him, holding him responsible for the death of his mother. He feels she was ignored while Kamal was away playing football.

So Kamal, now with a low ranked club Shobhabajar Union, who nobody takes seriously, is playing his last match against his former club Juger Jatri. If Jatri wins, they would go on to become the champions of the Calcutta league, ahead of East Bengal and Mohun Bagan. And Kamal playing as a stopper (or defender), is the one man standing between Jatri and victory.

Moti Nandi mixes fact and fiction very well. He manages to capture the various facets of football in Calcutta, right from describing the various grounds, to how crowds behave, to footballers from the lower-ranked clubs throwing matches for some small favours from the bigger clubs. Nandi’s intimate knowledge of the club scene is not surprising given that he was the sports editor of Ananda Bazaar Patrika. Both the stories are well crafted and  form ideal world cup-time fiction.