Chuni Goswami, and India’s unending quest for a global hero
Nearly 60 years after it happened, it remains one of Indian sport’s most significant sliding-doors moments. What if Subimal ‘Chuni’ Goswami had gone to attend a trial at Tottenham Hotspur in the early 1960s, when they were London’s premier club? What if the legendary Bill Nicholson had then signed him? What if, playing alongside the great Jimmy Greaves, he had gone on to make the sort of impact South Korea’s Cha Bum-kun did in West Germany nearly two decades later? Would it have been the spur for Indian football to at least be a continental superpower?
What we do know is this. Goswami, who passed away on April 30 at the age of 82, didn’t go, staying loyal to his beloved Mohun Bagan until he quit football at the age of 30. Indian football went into a tailspin from which it has never recovered, and Spurs (unrelated to the Goswami episode) ceded top-club status in London first to Arsenal and then Chelsea. Both those clubs have large fan bases in India now. The Spurs’ one is non-existent.
With Goswami’s demise — just five weeks after the passing of PK Banerjee, his friend, comrade-in-arms, and club rival — only one man remains of the famous quintet that led India to Asian Games glory in Jakarta in 1962. Jarnail Singh, the defensive rock of that side, was first to go, succumbing to respiratory problems in Vancouver nearly two decades ago.
Peter Thangaraj, the goalkeeper considered Asia’s answer to Lev Yashin, passed away in November 2008. Now, with two-thirds of the much-vaunted forward line gone within the space of weeks, only the last, most tragic, link remains. Tulsidas Balaram, whose flicked goal in a 2–1 loss to mighty Hungary at the Rome Olympics (1960) remains one of the high watermarks of Indian football, had to quit the game in 1963 after attacks of pleurisy. He still lives on the outskirts of Kolkata, with not even a Padma Shri to recognise what he did for the sport those years ago.
My generation never saw these men play, but their stories were passed down by those like my great-uncle who seldom missed a match in north Kerala — back when the Sait Nagjee invitational tournament was a massive draw — in the first two decades of his life. Apart from the five players mentioned earlier, there was also Inder Singh, who had taken Balaram’s place in attack by the time India finished runners-up to Israel at the Asian Cup in 1964.
That achievement, under Harry Wright, was the beginning of the end. In truth, Indian football died on May 11, 1963, when Syed Abdul Rahim, the national team’s finest coach, fell victim to cancer. Rahim wasn’t just a strict disciplinarian and great motivator. He was also someone who stayed abreast of tactical changes.
In a time when there were no YouTube clips or scouts on every continent, Rahim somehow managed to keep pace with the formation tweaks that would make Hungary’s Magic Magyars the first great modern football team. It was MTK Budapest’s Márton Bukovi that first began to use the 4–2–4 system, with Nándor Hidegkuti as the withdrawn forward — the old formations always had five up front.
Gusztáv Sebes adapted it for the national team — who would thrash England 6–3 and 7–1 in the build-up to the 1954 World Cup — while Béla Guttmann, the restless Jose Mourinho of his time, spread the gospel to South America. Rahim’s Indian team was one of the first national sides to play this way, and the Asian Games gold, in front of a hostile crowd, was his finest hour.
As much as his death, Indian football was also held back by those in charge of Kolkata’s maidans. The likes of Goswami and Sailen Manna may have stayed loyal to their clubs, but by the 1980s, the Kolkata League was a joke, with players switching loyalties every season. While other Asian countries left India far behind after building robust national leagues, the big Kolkata clubs were content being sharks in a pond that was shrinking year after year.
No Indian team made the slightest impression in continental club competitions, and the likes of Japan, South Korea, and west Asian nations like Saudi Arabia and Iran moved steadily ahead as they built a club infrastructure that would endure. Indian football, like the junkie unwilling to kick his habit, contented itself by taking potshots at cricket, which had supplanted it as the major sport.
While cricket changed with the times, football remained stuck in the dark ages. It was a vicious cycle too. My generation started staying away from the stadiums because we had begun to see just how far behind Indian football had fallen. Second-rate entertainment didn’t have much appeal. In the years when Japan set up the J-League and attracted some of the game’s biggest names, our most talented players were still yo-yoing between clubs that had no concept of building a team.
As much as we should celebrate what Goswami and Banerjee achieved on the field, we should also question why they couldn’t do more to stem the cancer that set in soon after they retired. Did they not want to rock the boats they had sailed in? Did they lack the global perspective required to see that a thriving national league, and moving overseas, was the only way forward?
Well over half a century after Goswami decided not to try his luck in England, no Indian player has come close to breaching the glass ceiling at a leading club. Across Asia, there’s no such shortage of role models. Iran’s Ali Daei played for Bayern Munich. Japan’s Shinji Kagawa was central to Jurgen Klopp’s success at Borussia Dortmund. South Korea’s Park Ji-sung made vital contributions to Sir Alex Ferguson’s last great Manchester United side.
As for India, even as we mourn Goswami and the titans of forgotten, black-and-white era, we’re still holding out for a hero.