As the final whistle went off at the Jalan Besar stadium in the Tampines area of Singapore, a pub on Magrath Road in Bengaluru 1970 miles away erupted.
The Arbor Brewing Company, the official hang-out spot for the fans – and sometimes, the players, of the city’s favourite football club – was celebrating the progress of Bengaluru FC to the semi-final of the 2016 AFC Cup, a mere three years after the inception of the club amidst modest expectations.
The sea of blue at Arbor could not stop chanting as a 0-0 draw against opponents Tampines Rovers proved enough to see their team win the two-legged quarter-final tie, after CK Vineeth had scored what turned out to be the winning goal at home the week before.
Difficult beginnings
Yet, this was difficult to imagine when the All India Football Federation (AIFF) had invited bids from corporates to form I-League teams in 2013 on its 75th anniversary. This was done in a move to increase participation from cities outside Kolkata and Goa, for long the hotspots of Indian football.
The city of Bengaluru, whose large population of professionals is deeply involved with English, Spanish and other European teams, had seen no I-League action in years. Cricket had been a major draw as usual, with Royal Challengers Bangalore pulling in sizeable crowds on every night of IPL action.
In 2013, the sporting landscape in the city was about to take another dramatic turn when it was announced that Jindal Steel Works (JSW) would set up and run a team in the city. But with just four months to go before the league began, how would the new club find players who weren’t already contracted to an I-League club?
The only option was to recruit players who played for smaller clubs, or rejects with no contracts at all. On the eve of the grand unveiling of the club, the Steelmen had managed to sign up all of 12 players – some of them from smaller clubs and the rest discards or fringe players at other clubs.
They still needed a marquee signing to convince the fans and the players that this was a project worth pursuing. The ace striker of the Indian national team, Sunil Chhetri had returned to India after a failed stint at Sporting Lisbon. The timing for both club and player couldn’t have been more perfect. With Chhetri on board, things changed.
The mercurial young Englishman
“You’re not out of the Westwoods yet,” reads a banner in the West Block stand of the Sri Kanteerava stadium, BFC's home ground. The man that it refers to is an ex-Manchester United youth academy graduate and a hard-nosed defender who played for 18 years across several levels of the English football league system.
When a 36-year old Ashley Westwood was introduced as the first manager of the Blues, he was tasked with leading the club into the top three of the league within the first three years. Westwood didn’t have to bother with escaping relegation as the AIFF inserted a three-year no-relegation clause into the club’s contract, thanks to JSW’s initial investment.
The Englishman beat all expectations, showing the other clubs how to instil professionalism and state of the art techniques on and off the pitch. For the first time, an Indian club was making use of GPS for tracking players’ movements and heart-rate monitors for physical assessments. Bengaluru FC was the Ark and Westwood was its Noah.
At the time of his arrival, Chhetri was the club’s only Indian player. By the time Westwood left at the end of his three-year contract, there were eight – twice as many as at any other Indian club – in the senior squad alone. Young Indian players knew that they could come to the club, train hard, have their fitness levels monitored and maximised, and stand a good chance at becoming an international.
Westwood left the club with a glittering array of honours: two I-League titles, entry to the last 16 of the AFC Cup, and a Federation Cup, shattering the wildest of expectations. He had been four minutes away from winning another I-League title in 2015, but eventual champions, Mohun Bagan, scored in the 86th minute to in BFC’s home ground to draw the match 1-1 and become the champion.
Nonetheless, the Westwood effect was clear: 20,000 spectators had turned up to watch the game, within just two years of the club’s formation.
This is how the best teams do it
From printing out match-day pamphlets and organising fan days and open training sessions to starting soccer schools with full-time residential programmes and setting up five age group teams (Under-9, U-11, U-13, U-15 and U-17), the JSW and BFC officials picked up the better aspects of football in the West to bring a unique and delightful experience not just to the city, but to Indian football.
Westwood’s departure meant that new coach Albert Roca’s first two games in charge would be the AFC Cup quarter-final tie against an in-form side, runners-up in Singapore’s S-League. BFC, having gone one step further than their maiden appearance in the Asian variant of the Europa League, were expected to struggle. Experts tipped them to lose to “superior opponents”, especially after the Singapore side had knocked out another Indian side, Mohun Bagan, in the previous round.
The departure of Westwood was supposed to be the onset of a crisis at the club, but Roca, in the middle of transforming the team’s philosophy from counter-attack to possession football, was having none of that.
The Blues shut out the opposition at home with a 1-0 victory and went on to record another clean sheet away in a 0-0 draw in Singapore with a defensive masterclass while creating the more dangerous of the chances through Eugeneson Lyngdoh. The result was all the more impressive as BFC were short on match practice, and playing their first game after a gap of almost four months.
Next up is a match-up which can be described as almost poetic; the pretenders to the throne against the reigning kings as Bengaluru take on defending AFC Cup champions Johor Darul Ta’zim of Malaysia, with the first leg away on September 28 and the return leg in Bengaluru on October 19.
BFC have lost to their semi-final opponents twice in this year’s group stage, and are the clear underdogs heading into their biggest matches ever.
But that will not worry the team which once struggled to form a squad of 18 players. Their fans, after cruelly missing out on the quarters, will turn up at their noisiest best. At the moment, it really does seem as though the sky is the limit for the team from India’s IT capital; they may get knocked down, but don’t expect them to stay on the mat for the 10-count.
Instead, watch out for the counter-punch.