Winds of change on the maidan?

Like the Santosh Trophy, another footballing litmus test for West Bengal has, for nearly half a century now, been the Subroto Cup. Almost every fall, winners or slightly sheepish-looking runners-up, return from Delhi to Kolkata's Howrah Railway station as harbingers of good news for the season ahead on the Maidan, with greedy club scouts ready to gobble them up.
This year however, even if the one team from West Bengal, the Poura Patha Bhawan, Haldia manages to return home with the Subroto, the victory may not prove as resounding for the regional cause as before.In a purely Bengali sense, that is.
Poura Patha Bhawan, the school that provides education to those who train with the IFA academy, downed some of the legendary former Subroto Cup champions to wrest the right to represent Bengal in the tournament here. But, the very idea (of representing Bengal) is an aberration.
Or is it a reflection of the changing scenario in what many robustly claim and still cling to, as being the hotbed of Indian football?
With an intriguing mix of players from the North East in their squad at the Subroto here, footballers born and raised in Bengal find themselves as a minority in the squad. In fact, the 14-member team has only six West Bengal players. Not a single player, though, comes from the Kolkata metropolis, with Jewel Raja of Batanagar, Budge Budge being closest to the city. The rest of the squad comprises four from Mizoram and three from Manipur.
Run your eyes down the list and you will see a Zosangpuia, a Nzbeirona, a Rindika and a Chhnanawma, and even a Tomba Singh. "It's a fact that the boys from the hills play better football," an IFA official admitted from Kolkata. "It shows in the composition of the squad," he added.
"We called players from the entire North East apart from players from West Bengal. There were many enthusiastic players but the best 26 were short-listed by our chief coach Mohd. Habib," he added.
Not surprisingly, the local dialect is at a premium among the lads, though four others - Rejawl Hassan Midday, Md. Arshad Shah, Jewel Raja and Nijam Ali - speak it with a slightly Bangladeshi accent.
Not that everyone is complaining. "At times it becomes difficult to make them understand, but they are all catching up Bengali quite fast," says coach Sujit Chakraborty.
Chakraborty replaced Habib who is recuperating after a by-pass surgery. The Habib factor seems to loom large in the current context here, as the maidan legend is largely credited with having created the whirl that was the Tata Football Academy in the 90s. The Haldia experiment seems to have been modelled on the TFA.