Mohun Bagan's match against the East Yorkshire Regiment in 1911 is one of Asia's greatest football rivalries. The match set the tone for the first revolt against the imperial powers on the sports field.?
This picture of the?Mohun Bagan posing on August 15,?1889 during the time of the British Raj is going viral on Reddit and Indians couldn't be more proud.
The players in Mohun Bagan¡¯s Immortal XI were Hiralal Mukherjee, Bhuti Sukul, Sudhir Chatterjee, Manmohan Mukherjee, Rajen Sengupta, Nilmadhav Bhattacharya, Kanu Roy, Habul Sarkar, Abhilash Ghosh, Bijoydas Bhaduri, Shibdas Bhaduri (Captain).
Mohun Bagan defeated East Yorkshire Regiment 2-1 in the IFA Shield final in 1911 ¡ª a time when the independence movement was gaining momentum in India.?
Coached by the disciplinarian Sailen Basu, Kolkata¡¯s oldest Indian football club was invited to play the prestigious Indian Football Association (IFA) Shield?in 1911.?
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With this, the team members turned football into a symbol of revolt against the oppression their people were subjected to. The build-up for the match was enormous, scores of Indians travelled from far off districts?to watch the historic sports battle unfold in the Kolkata ground.?
In fact, the East Indian Railways was forced to start a special train to bring a large number of football fans to witness the game.?
The bare-footed eleven member Mohun Bagan team was faced with a far better trained East Yorkshire?team, but nothing budged their?spirit, because to win meant a national triumph not just in football field but for the country as a whole.?
At the beginning of the game, Sergeant Jackson of East Yorkshire Regiment cored first. Things didn't look all that good in the first few minutes of the game when the opponents?were beating them to the ground.?
But gradually, the Bagans gained momentum and changed the course in an instant after skipper Shibdas Bhaduri equalled the score with the English team. Abhilash Ghosh scored the winning goal to make it 2-1.
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And that's how they became overnight national icons, thus cementing the love for football that people of Kolkata hold to this day!?
The players of that Mohun Bagan team were all awarded the Mohun Bagan Ratna, posthumously.?
In memory?of the team's great success, the Bengal director Arup Roy even made a film titled Egaro, The Immortal Eleven, in 2011.
'Mohun Bagan had become synonymous with the national battle cry for Vande Mataram', wrote the noted sports historian Boria Majumdar in 2013.