Little excitement around low-key derby

We are long past the time when the whole of Bengal split up into two intensely hostile camps named Mohun Bagan and East Bengal ahead of a derby, each cursing the other and muttering threats, much in the tradition of football derbies everywhere, sometimes complete with violent confrontations among their loyalists.

- PULAKESH MUKHOPADHYAY

Tomorrow's 4 - 45 pm face-off at Salt Lake stadium is not really going to set pulses racing though, given that East Bengal have not won against Mohun Bagan for a long time and well might their fans jump out of their skins if they pull it off for a change. It will be for community scrapbooks, embellished pictorially. Social media's encyclopaedic collation of trivia suggests Bhaskar Ganguly, who has played so many Kolkata derbies himself, was asked the other day if he was going to roll up tomorrow at the ground, said that he might not, considering how badly East Bengal were doing, but then he was not sure he would not either. Maybe the give-and-take was half in jest but it implied much less than the gung-ho spirit the red-and-gold brigade were once upon a happy time known for.