World Cup eve – if there is such a thing – rekindles an especially delightful memory in I. Arumainayagam. He casts his mind back to 22 September 1977, when the New York Cosmos team arrived in Calcutta for a friendly match with Mohun Bagan. It is estimated that close to 100,000 people descended on the Eden Gardens that day, not so much out of regard for the Cosmos – a fledgling, American soccer club – but to watch in action one particular player: a short forward called Pele.
“Later that evening, there was a dinner,” says Arumainayagam, a member of the Indian football team that won the gold medal at the 1962 Asian Games. “I was with the Indian Railways in Madras then but as a former Mohun Bagan player, I was invited along. The late Tamil actor R. Muthuraman was a big football enthusiast, so he too joined me.”
Pele did not say much, Arumainayagam recalls, but to meet the three-time World Cup winner in person was an unsurpassable thrill. “We shook hands with him and it was a great moment for me,” he says. “He was not fluent in English, so there wasn’t much conversation. Besides, there were many people waiting in line.”
Like during all previous World Cups, his loyalties are firmly with Brazil, states Arumainayagam, one of a number of top Indian footballers to emerge from Bangalore.
“Brazil are the favourites this time, although Spain look good too,” he says.
Arumainayagam’s generation was followed by that of N. Ulaganathan, another of Bangalore’s famous exports to the football grounds of Calcutta. There is much World Cup fervour, he observes, in his neighbourhood. “Everybody seems really excited. I have heard that they’re planning to erect a big screen in Gouthampura.” Ulaganathan’s World Cup memories are dominated by one man.
“Diego Maradona was just incredible; he won Argentina the 1986 World Cup all by himself,” he says. “Maradona came to Calcutta once but I couldn’t meet him.”
The former India captain Carlton Chapman, perhaps the last player from the city to scale such heights, is another who calls Maradona his favourite.
“As a child I used to watch Maradona whenever he was playing,” he says. “He could do things single-handedly; these days, you don’t get to see much of that.”
