Beyond The Goal

With due respect to your football credentials, it’s difficult to understand your quote…‘but still, we are far lucky than what we got in 2011. Compared to the last Asia Cup (appearance), we are happy and lucky’. I couldn’t really understand what you actually wanted to convey to your fans and followers. You also took a critic’s role by saying that Stephen Constantine’s rotating policy is not helping Team India. Mr Bhutia you want to don multiple mantle and that becomes difficult to understand your motives. If football was your first love and priority, you wouldn’t have joined politics. After you had quit football, you were clueless about your future. It wasn’t difficult to gauge your political ambition – Lok Sabha and then State Assembly elections. Your dreams crashed while representing a leading Bengal party, but again you have started to dream and launched a new political party in your own state. Those who’ve covered football during your career would say, ‘...

Mohun Bagan once epitomised tradition, fair play, dignity and virtues, but today those are missing from their iconic status as one of the leading Indian football clubs. It can be recalled that in the 1970s when a few footballers refused to take part in a tournament, the then club secretary Dhiren Dey declared that Bagan would field its groundsmen. That was the spirit and values the club stood for, but that seems to have vanished. The factional politics has done more harm to its image in recent months just like it did in 2004-05. This time the club’s Executive Committee has resigned en masse to protest against Anjan Mitra and his inefficiency. The club has lost McDowell as its sponsor, and what stands today is all about misery and false ego. There’s no need to crib and cry over its doomed fate as Bagan and the other two – East Bengal and Mohammedan Sporting – has seldom understood the importance of professionalism. If a tournament like ISL has spread its wings, it’s becaus...