Word: bhimani
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Matches between Mohun Bagan and East Bengal dominated the Kolkata sports scene for decades thereafter. "It was hardly football; it was religion," says Kishore Bhimani, a veteran journalist who did football commentary in Kolkata in the 1970s. Though the playing squads were often mixed - eight of Mohun Bagan's 11 who famously beat the British in 1911 were from East Bengali backgrounds - supporters, for the most part, were fiercely sectarian. On both sides, they would routinely wait three days in line to collect tickets. The names of game-winning goal scorers and clumsy defenders entered city lore year after year...
...such civic-wide obsession began to wane as television crept in during the 1980s and Indians were exposed to the wider, far superior world of sports. "The knowledge seeped in that we weren't very good," says Bhimani. The militant sense of east-west ethnic pride faded with the partition generation and today support for the two clubs has to do less with regional identity and more with plain club loyalty. Imported Brazilian and Nigerian players now star for both sides and routinely swap teams. The bulk of the upper and middle classes who once passionately cared about Kolkata football...
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