End of an era: India loses football legend
nKOLKATA: With Pradip Kumar Banerjee’s death on Friday afternoon, Indian football lost its point of reference.
Being a robust rightwinger — the best ever according to his team mate Tulsidas Balaram — with a knack for goals, and an India captain who played two Olympics and three Asian Games were only parts of a remarkable life which Fifa acknowledged with its Centennial Order of Merit in 2004.
Banerjee was also a successful coach at East Bengal and Mohun Bagan, and to a lesser extent for India.
Exuding charisma off the pitch helped Banerjee forge a long career in the media as well. For six decades from the 1950s, he was associated with Indian football in many different avatars. In their 70s now, Shyam Thapa and Subhas Bhowmick, both part of the 1970 Asian Games bronze medal winning team, call him “guru”, as does Bhaichung Bhutia, who retired in 2011.
“He is the biggest character Indian football had,” said Bhowmick.
Banerjee, who died aged 83 after a long illness that saw him on life support since March 2, debuted for India against Sri Lanka in Dhaka in 1955. Banerjee scored two goals in his first match and 12 more in 45 internationals.
In 1956, Banerjee was part of the team that became the first from Asia to make the Olympics semi-final. Four years later, at the Rome Olympics, he was captain. The Olympic rings shine at the gate of his house in Salt Lake in eastern Kolkata, and there was a time when he accompanied his autograph with the caption: “Captain of Indian Football Team, Rome
Olympics, 1960.”
India lost 1-2 to bronze medallists Hungary. Banerjee scored in the 1-1 draw against France.
By then, India’s most famous attacking trio of Chuni Goswami, Banerjee and Balaram had been formed. India won 12 of the 16 games in which they played together. In those games, all between 1958 and 1962, the trio scored 20 of India’s 36 goals. Banerjee and Goswami scored seven each and Balaram six. On way to the 1962 Asian Games gold, they got nine of India’s 11 goals in five games; Jarnail Singh was the only other scorer. Known to have powerful shots off both feet, Banerjee, awarded the Arjuna in 1961, the year it was initiated, opened the scoring in the final against South Korea with a 17th minute tap-in. Singh, the central defender who was used as forward, made it 2-0 in the 20th in front of 100,000 fans rooting for the Koreans.
Born on June 23, 1936, in Moynaguri near Jalpaiguri in north Bengal to Prabhat and Beena, Prodipto Banerjee became Pradip Kumar — subsequently PK, to even his family — because of a “clerical error” at his alma mater Patna University.
Banerjee’s club career began with Kolkata’s Aryan Club where Amal Dutta — with whom he would have a storied rivalry as club coaches — was a team mate. But because they made him a ticket collector on a monthly salary of Rs 135 in 1955, it was to Eastern Railways that he stayed loyal through his playing career. Eastern Railways won the Calcutta League in 1958. The only other time one out of Mohun Bagan, East Bengal or Mohammedan Sporting did not win the league was in 2019.
Banerjee quit playing in 1967. By 1969, he was a certified coach. Along with GM Basha, he helped India win bronze in the 1970 Asian Games beating Japan 1-0 in the third-place play-off. He was a coach in 1982 when India lost in the quarter-finals of the Asian Games.
Banerjee joined East Bengal in 1972 and began a second innings that ended in 2003 as technical director at Mohammedan Sporting. He was coach when East Bengal beat Mohun Bagan 5-0 in 1975, still the biggest margin of victory between the arch rivals. As Mohun Bagan coach, he forced a 2-2 draw against Pele’s New York Cosmos in 1977, and shared the 1978 IFA Shield with USSR’S Ararat Yerevan. By 1978, it used to be said, “Wherever PK goes, trophies follow.”
Conferred the Padma Shri in 1990, Banerjee was devastated by wife Aarti’s death in 2003. In 2006, he suffered a cerebral stroke.
He recovered enough to resume public appearances, usually in flamboyant printed shirts and large steelframed glasses. He was a raconteur who could reference Shakespeare and Tagore and be relevant even to a generation which hadn’t seen him coach. “PK da was always a very happy person, full of energy and full of great stories,” said Bhutia.