Mohammedan Sporting
This is a collection of articles archived for the excellence of their content. |
2013: Durand Cup final
See graphic:
Celebrating a goal in the Durand Cup final in 2013- Mohammedan Sporting
From: Siddharth Saxena, Why an iconic football club is facing an identity crisis, January 15, 2018: The Times of India
2018: decline
The 126-year-old Mohammedan Sporting, the country’s first pan-Indian team and a symbol of the Muslim community, struggles to stay relevant
It is December 12, and Kolkata’s roads are choked. Marking the 25th anniversary of the Babri Masjid demolition, West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee has called a rally at the Maidan. Yet, the Mohammedan Sporting Club tent is an oasis of indifferent silence. A large orangeplumed rooster struts about in the sparse lawns — perhaps the only swag you will see all day.
Not far, a row of team shirts in the iconic black and white colours are drying; the upturned numbers, in a sense, signify the predicament of a once-imperious club. Here is an institution, founded in 1891, that had once been a symbol of Muslim identity, a rallying point through the tumultuous years of Independence.
“In the eyes of the world, the Indian Muslim ethos was identified through three broad symbols: the Aligarh Muslim University, Darul Uloom Deoband and Mohammedan Sporting,” says Zafar Ali Khan, a veteran journalist and devoted Mohammedan Sporting chronicler. Today, the image of the club, now a middling team in the I-League Second Division, has taken a beating with both audiences and funds shrinking.
With the greatest support base across the country, Mohammedan Sporting was perhaps the first pan-Indian sporting idea. Indian football’s most travelled team, they drew crowds from the Muslim community wherever they played. In the deeply intertwined Calcutta maidan matrix, while Mohun Bagan proudly wore its upper-class, aristocratic makeup as a badge, and East Bengal represented a fierce refugee ethos, the non-Hindu, non-Bengali communities in the diverse city chose to be associated with the third club in town. Kolkata’s Chinese community, for instance, has always famously chosen to identify with Mohammendan Sporting. It is this idea that the club is struggling to keep afloat today.
“They were the first to take players from all over India, right from the Frontier Province down to Kerala,” remembers Ashok Mitra. Frail and touching 90, the economist and politician can still reel off names (with their playing positions) of the crack Sporting team of the 1930s that was the first Indian team to win the Calcutta League, then largely accepted as the national championship. “Like a thunderbolt, they arrived on the scene,” says Mitra.
The club that relied mainly on members’ contributions and huge gate-money, is today facing a fund crunch. Even a season’s budget of Rs 1-2 crore is hard to cobble up. “We were players, recruiters and sponsorfinders all rolled into one,” remembers Shabbir Ali, a former Mohammedan and India great. Today, at a time of rising commercialisation of the game, Mohammedan Sporting’s continued neglect perhaps points to a certain reluctance to associate with a Muslim institution.
Not many even among the Muslim elite are keen to be associated with it. Club insiders talk of a Bengal tea and tobacco giant who contributes but will not be openly attached to it. That hesitancy extends to other business communities as well. Even Mamata’s interest in the club is seen as a tool for minority appeasement. “Vote bank hai, isliye welfare hai,” says Mohd Salahuddin, a 56-year-old green shutter manufacturer.
Today, the club painstakingly rebuilds through the age-group and junior leagues. It still draws crowds, but mainly in subaltern India — the hawkers and puchkawalas as Zafar describes them. “Recently, we played a small tournament in Mau, 100km north of Banaras. Over 30,000 people turned up on hearing Mohammedan Sporting had come,” says Bilal Ahmed Khan, a longtime club administrator.
The fervour is a shadow of the past when it spawned imitations in Dhaka, Chittagong, and Delhi. Three clubs — City, Moghals and Indian Nationals — in the capital owe their DNA to it. Maqbool Ali, a 74-year-old from old Delhi, recollects an incident: “In the 1960 DCM Trophy at the Dilli Gate ground (now Ambedkar Stadium), an infringement led to an East Bengal goal. The crowd was furious, play was stopped. PM Nehru was in attendance and it was getting ugly. Noted Urdu poet Kunwar Mohinder Singh Bedi ‘Sahar’ had to grab the mic and recite a few couplets to calm the crowds, but it gave you a sense of the craze for Mohammedan Sporting in Delhi.”
Mohammedan Sporting’s status altered with the rise of the Left in Bengal in the 1970s, symbolised by East Bengal’s domineering charge. To many, its current state is symptomatic of the state of Indian Muslims today, as they grapple with a lack of leadership and feel increasingly politically irrelevant. Mohd Dawood, 62, a leather trader in Kolkata, sums it up best. “Woh zamaana toh ab beet gaya. Bees saal sey team haar rahi hai. Aur saath mein hum log bhi (The days of glory are gone. The team has been losing and so are we),” he sighs.
The club’s funds crunch perhaps points to a certain reluctance to associate with a Muslim institution
