Warrior spirit of Minerva Punjab on display in I-League

Minerva’s stellar run in the I-League might not be on the same level as Aizwal’s fairy tale run last season, but Khogen Singh’s team has brought Punjab back in India football landscape. Vishnu Prasad traces their journey, which could end with their maiden title...

As the referee blew his whistle at Coimbatore’s Nehru Stadium on Friday, Minerva Punjab’s players collapsed to floor and lay there with their hands over their faces. They looked like a team that had lost the final of a major tournament. In a sense, that was exactly what their match against Chennai City was — win and they would have had one hand on the I-League trophy.

A 2-1 loss ensured that their fortunes were no longer in their hands. East Bengal could now take the title by winning their last two games. It is most definitely not the end — East Bengal’s two games against Shillong Lajong and second-placed NEROCA are as tough as they get — but it felt like one.
“Everyone was upset in the dressing room,” says Minerva’s coach Khogen Singh. “But I don’t think anyone was upset because of their performance. Everyone gave it their all. We were upset because some decisions by the referee cost us the game.

Perhaps, losing out after coming so close is a more fitting end to their story for Minerva Punjab are the anti-Aizawl. Theirs is no fairy tale, for fairy tales don’t usually involve players being approached for match-fixing, journalists boycotting press conferences or referees being blasted after every loss. Fairy tales are meant to be paradoxes — they make you shake your head in disbelief and restore your belief in something at the same time. Minerva’s season only achieved the former.

It’s hard to recall the kind of peans that were sung for Aizawl last year, being dished out during Minerva’s run. There was little talk of Leicester City moments and sticking up for the little guy. No one travelled to Chandigarh to piece together Minerva’s history. As Aizawl took on Mohun Bagan last year in their penultimate clash — they were almost exactly in the same position as Minerva — the who’s who of Indian football descended down on Mizoram — administrators, former players, fans, journalists.
The press box was as packed as the stands, not many in either sections were sitting. On Friday though, nobody was fighting for seats in the stands and the number of journalists in the press box could be counted on one hand.

Maybe it is that nobody was ready for two underdog stories in two years — familiarity, after all, breeds contempt. Maybe it is that the I-League this year, shorn of Bengaluru FC and India’s best footballers, just doesn’t feel like India’s top flight, though the powers that be still insist it is. Maybe it’s the fact that Chandigarh isn’t Aizawl. That in itself robs the Minerva story of the many poignant themes that made Aizawl’s one such a big hit with everyone. This is not a story of a people long cut off from mainland India bridging that gap through football. Khogen is no Khalid Jamil, in search of redemption. A writer can invoke neither mist nor mountains when attempting to bring to life, the Minerva’s story. Minerva 2018 is just not — for lack of a better word — as sellable as Aizawl 2017.

Yet none of that should take anything away from what Minerva have achieved. Over the last 12 months, they’ve managed to influence Indian football like no other. At the beginning of last year, they won the U-16 Youth League for a second consecutive time, beat the India’s World Cup bound U-17 team and contributed three players to the eventual squad.

Then, with a budget as minuscule as Aizawl the previous year, they’ve led the league till the final week, all while fielding a motley crew of no-name foreigners, local players and academy graduates. They took a punt on Chencho Gyletshen, a Bhutanese forward who has arguably been the I-League’s player of the season. Five of their starting eleven on Friday were from Punjab, a region not exactly thought of as a footballing hotbed.

“We had little money compared to the likes of East Bengal and Mohun Bagan and yet here we’ve come so close,” Khogen says. “I think the fact that a lot of our players are youngsters who’ve just come from the academy is a strength, not a weakness. The philosophy we’ve instilled in them at the academy — give it your all for every game and never back down in face of a challenge — that’s exactly the attitude that the entire team has had. That is what has got us so close to the title.”

So close will probably end up a bit too far, but when the season is done, Minerva deserves a standing ovation no matter where they finish. To borrow a line from the Dark Knight, they may be the underdog story no one needed right now, but they have been every bit as special as Indian football deserves.