Club From Nowhere Scripts Football Fairytale - Aizwal FC Are Ready To Become First I-League Champions From North East

Football dreams are made of these. If the rain hung heavy in the clouds, the thunder played out on the turf below. Eleven thousand Mizos and some more jumped and swayed and sang their he arts out in the April drizzle. Perhaps the quaking in the stands spread and got to formidable Mohun Bagan. If the mist killed off their visibility, when the air got clearer, Bagan couldn't find the ground beneath their feet. You would tremble too, if you were watching this sporting fairytale unfolding before your eyes.

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Fewer stories in Indian sport celebrate the universally-loved idea of the underdog bigger than tiny Aizawl FC's march this I-League season -they ran this club with a budget equivalent to what Bagan ostensibly spent on one player alone, Haitian Sony Norde, who received around Rs 2 crore from the Kolkata giants.

Not many would match that romance of sporting belief and redemption than this journey and crucially , fewer still, would carry a greater resonance forward. On Saturday , Aizawl needed a two-goal margin to claim the title, Bagan needed to win the match.

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The local side's 1-0 triumph -a header by Zohmingliana Ralte -meant that the tiny north-eastern club now travel to the final weekend of India's national football league needing just a point against regional rivals, Lajong of Shillong.

It should a fitting finale -Lajong were the first club from the region on the national map, and now, Aizawl have barged into the scene. Aizawl's belief showed in the way they kept Sony Norde, Bagan's Haitian ace under a tight leash. Norde's salary alone equals Aizawl's entire budget for the season.

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To think, they shouldn't even have been here in the first place. Relegated in their debut last season, they were re-admitted to the footballing elite when Goan clubs fell out with the All India Football Federation over the I-League and ISL merger issue and they needed to make up the numbers.

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Their coach, Khalid Jamil, a young man in the garb of an old-fashioned disciplinarian, was shunned in Mumbai where he had earned his stripes as a player. He rallied Ashutosh Mehta and Jayesh Rane, out of favour Mumbaikars, a Goan goalkeeper in Albino Geovani, Mahmoud al Amna, a Syrian ex-international who had played near Aleppo and the usual trusted batch of local players to forge this extraordinary story that speaks for the north-eastern identity just as it holds promise for modestly-financed but expertly-managed clubs in Indian team sport.

Post Match Celebrations at Aizawl.#AFC 1:0 #MB #AFCvMB #HeroILeague pic.twitter.com/JENUcoSFTc

¡ª Hero I-League (@ILeagueOfficial) 22 April 2017

For long, we were comfortable with identifying the North East as the supply line of footballers to the rest of the country . If Manipur was the pioneer till a decade ago, Mizoram is the standard to follow today - as many as was 58 players from Mizoram play for club in the ten-team I-League. Now they are carving out their own identity as a footballing unit on the national level.