Tags:
Journalism of Courage
Suddenly, there was this old gentleman gate-crashing into the media box with his grandson. He couldn’t manage a seat in the stands. While he wept, watching Assam create history winning the men’s football title for the first time in National Games, his team was doing the victory lap, acknowledging cheers from the packed Nehru Stadium.
Then he turned to his grandson and said: “Feels like those old days when we would skip college and come to watch the Bordoloi Trophy matches in the early sixties. Same kind of crowd, same atmosphere, I hope those days are back again.”
And his hero, Gabindra Boro, the Assam custodian, couldn’t have chosen a better stage to perform his heroics. He saved Tamil Nadu’s final penalty shot to give Assam a 6-5 win after the teams were locked 1-1 in regulation and extra time.
Boro was nervous before he went to keep for the last shot. “I just prayed. Come what may, let me save this one. I wanted to save Assam,” he said later. And he did.
In a thrilling encounter where Assam dominated the proceedings right from the start, Mrinal Boro gave them the lead as early as the 18th minute. Boro tapped in a rebound off a defender after Thoiba Singh had shot one straight into the defender.
Jotin Singh brought the crowd to a pin-drop silence 10 minutes later. The Tamil Nadu striker latched on to a cross from Muthu from the edge of the box and slipped it past a diving Gabindra.
Thereafter, though the hosts dominated proceedings in the midfield, they couldn’t manage to penetrate the Tamil Nadu defence. Playing a defensive game, gauging the home team’s strength and the partisan crowd, Tamil Nadu at times caught Assam unawares on the counter-attack.
The 30,000-odd at the ground would have wept for a different reason had Jotin Singh’s beautiful goal off a bicycle kick not been declared off-side, minutes before the end of the first half of extra time.
Assam deserved to win. They came close to scoring on a number of occasions, but nerves had the Assamese strikers fumble in front of the goal. The bar too came in the way once. A Mrinal Boro free-kick from a couple of yards off beat the Tamil Nadu custodian Sakthivel and rebounded off the post.
In the penalty shoot-out, Sanjiba Rongpi, Mrinal Boro, Dhanchandra Singh, Thoiba Singh and Naoba Singh found the target for Assam and for Tamil Nadu, Alauddin, Muthu, Rajesh and Jotin Singh scored, while their striker James Singh failed to find the mark.
