Festive to furious: How the mood soured at Salt Lake stadium
Lionel Messi's tour of Kolkata ended in chaos as fans overwhelmed security, leading to violence and damage at Salt Lake Stadium during his visit.
Kolkata: A football god in a land of non-believers – that could have been one way of looking at Lionel Messi’s short tour of India which devolved into chaos at the Salt Lake stadium 20 minutes after he arrived here on Saturday morning.
For it came at a time when Indian football, the men’s club game at least, has been kicked to touch. A time when clubs and the All India Football Federation are locked in a stand-off that has triggered letter bombs after a long court case.
Another way of looking at it would be that Messi supersedes all that. “Football’s worth watching if Messi has the ball,” Diego Maradona, who, like Messi, had visited Kolkata twice, had said. “He’s a unicorn, man – not just for what he does on the field,” Don Garber, commissioner Major League Soccer (MLS), said of Messi, 38, after the Inter Miami star was adjudged the most valuable player for his 29 goals and 19 assists, an effort that fetched him 70.4% of the votes, the next best being 11.2%. “There’s something about the way he’s wired.”
On a sun-kissed winter morning, Kolkata showed both statements could be true. Home to three of the oldest extant clubs in Asia, all of whom took part in the last edition of the Indian Super League (ISL), the country’s top tier competition that has now been stalled, the Salt Lake stadium was packed by around 50,000 as per eye estimates. Many of them, including a father reluctantly walking the last kilometre with his excited young son because police had closed most of the roads leading to the stadium for traffic, were in Argentina’s sky blue and white stripes and the deep blue that is their second strip. There were others in Barcelona shirts and some in Inter Miami’s pink.
Faces painted in colours of the Argentina flag, some also came wearing ponchos and scarves. Both were being sold on footpaths on the stadium perimeter for anything between ₹200 to ₹450, depending on your bargaining power. One intrepid seller even had Cristiano Ronaldo’s Al-Nassr shirt on offer in the same price range.
Balloons in white and sky blue and Argentina and India flags gave the teeming, heaving cauldron the feel of hosting an international featuring the reigning world champions. Or, a top player being presented to the fans as they do in Europe and, with Messi, in the USA.
At different times, Messi has been called a transformational agent for soccer in the USA. When their “numero diez (No.10)” played for Inter Miami for the first time, Serena Williams, Kim Kardashian and Lebron James were in attendance. Messi is used to stars behaving like fans around him. Just as Sourav Ganguly and Shah Rukh Khan were expected to at Salt Lake stadium on Saturday. One didn’t turn up because the event had collapsed into chaos. Ganguly did but the crowd did not get to see the prince of cricket with the king of football.
The start was good. Fans posed for selfies and the vast amphitheatre that has hosted Pele, Maradona, Oliver Kahn and where Messi began his journey as Argentina captain in 2011 throbbed, heaved and sang along to the live music that kickstarted the programme. A football friendly between a Mohun Bagan XI and Diamond Harbour XI followed where a host of former Indian stars found that their desire to relive their glory days was trapped in an uncooperative body.
The match was paused when Messi arrived at 11.30am in a white SUV that had a sunroof, the stadium chanting his name. As Messi got out of the car with Inter Miami teammates Rodrigo de Paul and Luis Suarez, they were consumed by a swarm of people, one of whom waving a replica of the football World Cup trophy. In hindsight, it was the first sign of chaos.
Because that crowd of hangers-on stayed with Messi, known as El Pulga (The Flea), as he met the players, signed their shirts, received one from Bagan, and moved around the pitch. The stadium roared as he waved. But gradually, their view blocked by hangers-on around Messi, the mood began to turn sour. When Messi left abruptly, they got wild.
In scenes reminiscent of the 1996 cricket World Cup semi-final between India and Sri Lanka at Eden Gardens, water bottles and other missiles rained on the manicured pitch. Banners of the “GOAT Tour” were ripped off before the crowd broke through the barricades and came on to the turf.
Uprooted from their moorings, chairs were thrown to the ground. Bottles were aimed at state sports minister Aroop Biswas, who was seen posing for a photograph with Messi a little earlier. The white billowy tent erected for Messi was destroyed and its stands used to pound the fiberglass covering of the players’ tunnel. The damage caused to the stadium, refurbished for the 2017 under-17 World Cup, was significant.
After almost 45 minutes of asking and shepherding people out of the pitch, the police, many of whom were attacked, did a mild lathicharge. A crowd had also gathered outside the hotel adjacent to the stadium where Messi had checked in early on Saturday, but was cleared by the police.
