Television didn’t show the people who burst into full-throated cheers when East Bengal, down 0-4 against Kuwait SC, pulled two goals back in the post-break play in Kuwait City on Tuesday night.
If you recalled its pre-kick-off visuals, the auditory surprise was considerable as the stadium with the look of the sets of a B-grade made-in-Mumbai pot-boiler hadn’t really seemed, euphemistically speaking, full to capacity. On the contrary, the huge tracts of untenanted territories in the stands, in a way, drove home the utter futility of the tournament called the Asian Football Confederation Cup, meant exclusively for the none too high-profile, timorous continent’s second-tier outfits.
If you had a cat and wanted to swing it about, the stadium was the place for you, giving you plenty of room for that, and the forlorn ambience revived in yours truly memories of Beirut, Amman and Sana during a previous edition of the competition.
One flew over from Kolkata, waited for more than six hours in Dubai for link flights and then fetched up in due season at the stadium for East Bengal’s matches to find few people other than the teams, referees and their assistants and officials of varying denominations around a venue.
Missing from the mise en scene was the element in the absence of which sport was apt to appear an exercise in futility: spectators. They had said it with their feet, by seeking other diversions elsewhere in this big, variegated world. We, in going in for continent-wide tournaments, seek to ape Europe, where fans move effortlessly from one country to another, following their favourites, but intra-Asian travel for football, even in 2013, is not really something that, unlike Americana, warts and all, has caught on. Also, it is said in the portals of power across the continent that Kolkata clubs are always something to be wary of, given their alleged predilection for bunging into their touring contingents completely unlikely people who would eventually turn out to be economic migrants.
Japan, apparently, has yet to trace quite a few from the eastern Indian metropolis who found themselves in the putative land of plenty back in the 1990s.
The AFC Cup, of course, specifies how many officials can be accompanying a team but the fact that we don’t get to see loyalists jostling one another to be airborne whenever a participating club fly abroad grab might be considered a pointer to the fact that watching these games is hardly one of their priorities in life, full as it happens to be of so many other things. And home fans don’t seem to care either. One hasn’t seen Salt Lake Stadium fill up for an AFC Cup game, regardless of the quality and reputation of the visitors.
Full-house crowds once saw East Bengal play Iraq’s Al Zawra at Kolkata and Siliguri, the Indians winning on the aggregate score after a sensationally audacious and superbly successful hometown display but word is marketing gurus wanted to split the big boys from their smaller brethren, begetting the Asian Champions League and the AFC Cup, thereby making for an entity that was dwarfed at birth.
Today, as those two away goals stir hopes in Indians that, back at Salt Lake Stadium, with 60,000 people shouting for them, East Bengal will at least have a fighting chance against Kuwait FC, the question that the football buff might find himself asking is: what about the 60, 000 that will thus be left vacant, assuming the actual turnout proves the current projection to be absolutely correct? Was there something wrong with the model Asia opted for? The fact of the matter is that the UEFA Champions League, in becoming a money-spinner, has also affected the game’s competitive quality because the European Cup was all and only about the continent’s best club teams. It didn’t even mean to be long on quantity because an artificial numerical inflation was left to the commercialised age to think up, damaging the game slowly, surely and, perhaps, irrevocably.
Asia may not be better off. Quite all right though it would be for the AFC to institute a unified competition featuring the continent’s top club sides, allotting it to willing candidates, the sanity of the proposal mightn’t be relished by marketing whizkids with a vested interest in fixture congestion.
They want as many matches as possible and a few more so their objectives are fulfilled. Football being played before empty bleachers is no skin off their nose.
