Host Bengal will be hoping to exploit the home advantage to break its prolonged title jinx in the senior National football championship for the Santosh Trophy.
Making a return to Bengal after a break of 23 years, the 64th edition of the tournament has raised expectations in the home side which has remained title-less for the last 11 seasons. Bengal, which has won the title on 29 occasions while all other States are yet to reach double digits, will be counting on the credentials of coach Shabbir Ali, the man who once won the title for the State as a player.
The main challenge round of the tournament will come at the end of the month with the quarterfinal league, which has last year's semifinalists seeded directly.
Seeded teams
Hence defending champion Goa, last year's runner-up Bengal, Services and Tamil Nadu will have the luxury of skipping the rigours of the cluster stage, which will have the rest of the 28 sides slogging it out for the four slots in the quarterfinals. The eight cluster winners will face off in the knockout pre-quarterfinals to fill up the four vacant spots.
Cluster stage
The cluster stage, that gets underway at three different venues on Thursday, will have the former champion and traditionally strong sides like Punjab, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Manipur, Kerala and Railways starting as favourites in different clusters.
The cluster stage and the pre-quarterfinals will be completed by July 28 before the start of the quarterfinal league on the next day. The semifinals will be held on August 6 and the final on August 8.
All the matches from the quarterfinal stages will be played at the Salt Lake Stadium, which now sports a synthetic turf.
The initial batch of teams, especially the ones playing in the top four clusters, has arrived while the remaining sides will arrive according to their respective fixtures.
During the earlier stages, apart form the Salt Lake Stadium, the district venues in Khardah, Howrah, Barasat and the Mohun Bagan ground in the city will be used to complete the schedule.
The tournament this time will be missing the stars with the 30 National team players busy in the camp in Portugal for next year's Asian Cup preparations. Some feel that this will help in seeing new talents.
Preliminary clusters :
Cluster I: Karnataka, Meghalaya, Jharkhand. Cluster II: Maharashtra, Chandigarh, Tripura, Andhra Pradesh.
Cluster III: Punjab, Puducherry, Gujarat, Nagaland. Cluster IV: Manipur, Jammu & Kashmir, Rajasthan.
Cluster V: Delhi, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh. Cluster VI: Haryana, Chhattisgarh, Sikkim.
Cluster VII: Kerala, Uttarakhand, Assam, Himachal Pradesh. Cluster VIII: Mizoram, Orissa, Railways.
