BackPhoto Essay | Fireworks at Fatorda
Zico and Konkani-style 'jogo bonito' have Goans flocking to local matches
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Football frenzy has been building up in Goa for a long time. Five years ago, the state team won the Santosh Trophy against once-dominant West Bengal, prompting The Times Of India to trumpet that “the heart and soul of Indian football is now overwhelmingly Goan, anyone with a spirit of the beautiful game in their veins will agree". By then, India’s smallest state could already boast of four teams out of the I-League’s total of 12 (the league title has only been won once by a non-Goan side in its seven-year history) and a stream of players from Goa had become mainstays of the national team.
But even as Goa amassed titles and trophies, the state’s fan base for domestic football dwindled. The footballista crazies of Panjim and Margao, and every village in every taluka, have remained obsessed with the highest level of the game—the days when Portugal or Brazil play in the world cup lead to statewide shutdowns, but depressingly, the Indian standard of play doesn’t get close.
Aficionados here rail against the national team’s astonishing decline to 159th in the world, recalling that just a few decades ago heavily Goan national teams regularly beat Japan, China and Korea, and even finished fourth at the Melbourne Olympics in 1956 after upsetting the hosts 4-2 (when Goa’s Neville D’Souza scored the first hat-trick by an Asian in Olympic history).
While sons of the red soil proliferated in the professional and coaching ranks of Indian football, and increasing numbers of them earned the national colours, the state’s stadia remained notably bare. I-League matches usually drew 2,000-3,000 spectators, while in-state derbies featuring the storied Salgaocar and Dempo teams might have attracted double that. It took the glitzy new, ongoing Hero Indian Super League (ISL) and the hometown franchise FC Goa to put the buzz back into football.
Now every match at the Fatorda ground pulsates with energy, music and dance that have to be experienced to be believed. Every game is sold out, with the stands filled to capacity with a broad mix of Goan families and fanatics (at least 30% women, and thousands of children).
Much of the ISL’s initial public relations strategy has centred on celebrities. So movie and cricket stars are omnipresent at the stadiums and on television, serving as mascots and “minority owners". For FC Goa, these roles are played by batsman Virat Kohli and, more inexplicably, the largely unknown (in Goa) Varun Dhawan, both of whom are roundly ignored by the orange-and-blue bedecked fans who fill up most of Fatorda’s 18,000 seats a full hour before the match. This is a truly Goan crowd that sings along with classic Konkani songs like Lorna’s Bebdo and brings drums, saxophones and trumpets to the match. These fans don’t care about Bollywood, for them it’s all about the Brazilians.
Of all the big names imported into India by the Ambani-backed IMG Reliance’s ISL, none compares to Rio de Janeiro-born Arthur Antunes Coimbra, aka Zico, one of the all-time greats. Goa’s football obsessives remember him as an uncanny playmaker through the 1970s and early 1980s, miraculously bending the ball in all directions. More than 100 fans may have greeted FC Goa’s top signing (and ex-Arsenal great) Robert Pirès at Dabolim airport when he arrived in September, but it was the news of Zico’s signing that turned the tide.
The Brazilian coach brought along Brazilian assistants, and—to more statewide delight—André Santos, the 31-year-old São Paulo-born player who has quickly emerged as the heart of FC Goa’s deft, speedy offence that wins more corners, and shoots on goal more often than any other team in the league. This attractive, attacking, Konkani-style jogo bonito—with local boys like Romeo Fernandes and Clifford Miranda integral to its success—has the stadium swinging to a samba rhythm all through each match. Utter mayhem broke loose with every goal on 26 November, the most important victory of the season for FC Goa as they moved to secure their place in the ISL play-offs with a decisive 3-0 drubbing of Kerala Blasters FC.
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