Subhas Bhowmick
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A brief biography
Nilesh Bhattacharya, January, 2022: The Times of India
Kolkata: Flamboyance has always been married with fantasy in the story of S ubhas Bhowmick, a prolific striker who brought a sense of modernity to Indian club football in his later avatar as a hugely successful coach. An intense reader of the game, he could traverse with consummate ease from Jose Mourinho’s mannerisms to Pep Guardiola’s mind to the teachings of Bengal’s mystic guru in the 19th century, Ramakrishna Paramahamsa. A chain smoker, he always made it clear how he imitated the habit from another football legend. “Johan Cruyff is my guru in football coaching and, you know, he was a smoker,” he used to remark. He was a byword for discipline and devotion on the field yet some of his actions --including the one in 2005 when he was arrested on charges of taking bribe from a business-man --often made him a magnet for the wrong kind of attention. “I want to live my life my way. I am not a slave to the established order,” he often said. As the 71-year-old Bhowmick, who was a member of India’s bronze-medal winning team in the 1970 Bangkok Asian Games and later managed East Bengal to the Asean Club Championship in Jakarta in 2003 for Indian club football’s most celebrated triumph on foreign soil, breathed his last at a city nursing home here on the wee hours of Saturday, he left behind a conflicting legacy. “He had to undergo dialysis regularly for about three and half months. He also underwent bypass surgery about 23 years ago. Recently, he contracted Covid and was admitted to a private hospital in Ekbalpur with a chest infection,” a family membersaid.
The state government and the city’s Big 3 clubs decided to shift him to a super-speciality hospital where the option of having a kidney transplant done on him was also being evaluated. “However, he didn’t give us time,” said sports minister Aroop Biswas. Born on October 2, 1950, Bhowmick is survived by his wife, son and daughter. “He was unique in his inimitable style. The way he used to accelerate past the defenders and bulldoze them with his speed was a tre at to watch,” former India defender andhis teammate Syed Na- yeemuddin told TOI. “He was amenace to the defenders,” he added. Bhowmick’s 84 goals for Mohun Bagan and 82 more for East Bengal bore testimonyto the fact thathe was worth his weight in gold and why he was an automatic choice for every coach during his playing careerfrom1967 to1979, despite the fact that his talent was often underpinned by offfield cases of controversies and ill-disciplines.
“Bhombol da (as Bhowmick was popularly known a s in the Maidan) was an a great team man. When he used to play with me at Mohun Bagan, he always guided juniors like us. Indian football didn’t give him his true value,” said Subrata Bhattacharya, who later as a Mohun Bagan coach, marked an exhilarating rivalry with Bhowmick’s East Bengal at the start of this century. Bhowmick later reinvented himself as a hugely successful coach in Indian club football, guiding East Bengal to back-to-back NFL titles.
