At 5:45 am on July 4, about 300 football fans gathered under a grey sky in Kolkata's Amartya Sen Udyan park to watch the World Cup match between Argentina and Cape Verde. The walls were decked with blue-and-white flags, plastic footballs, and life-size cutouts of Argentine players, with Messi dominating.
This unofficial home of the Kolkata Argentina Football Fan Club, the largest of its kind in the city, reaches peak passion every four years during the World Cup. The match went into extra time, and when defender Lisandro Martinez scored, fans erupted. The chant "MAY-SI" echoed through the park.
Messi, now 39, is revered in Kolkata as a Zen master of football. He scored all six goals for Argentina in the group stage. His tears after a crucial equalizer against Egypt in the 83rd minute moved fans deeply. Local photographer Debjoy Biswas said, "Watching Messi live is the closest I've come to footballing heaven."
Tea-shop owner Shib Sankar Patra and his wife Sapna have dedicated their lives to Messi and Argentina. Their home is painted in blue and white stripes, and they celebrated Messi's 39th birthday with an 18kg cake. "Messi put out his hand towards me," Patra recalled of meeting him last year.
Kolkata has been a football city since the 1890s, yet India has never qualified for a World Cup. This absence lends fandom a distinctive intensity. The rivalry between clubs Mohun Bagan and East Bengal draws crowds of over 50,000 and fosters a deep intellectual engagement with the sport.
Messi's visit to Kolkata last year turned chaotic when fans breached barricades. Analyst Debanjan Banerjee noted, "When you have larger-than-life idols, you cannot draw boundaries." The 1986 World Cup, the first widely televised in India, introduced Maradona to Kolkata and shifted allegiance from Brazil to Argentina.
Writer Indrajit Hazra recalled that supporting Argentina was unusual in the 1980s, but Maradona's magic changed everything. "Those images are imprinted on my mind," he said. For many, Messi represents the culmination of a long love affair between Bengal and Argentine football.
Source: www.aljazeera.com