Sushil Bhattacharjee at his Tollygunge home, amid the trophies he had won. Picture by Sayantan Ghosh

Bhattacharjee himself played cricket and hockey as well and has five centuries in the Maidan cricket league to show for his prowess with the willow.

The decision to sign with East Bengal didn’t seem wrong in the beginning as he played in 14 of the league matches and helped the team lift the CFL in his first year. The team went on to win the IFA Shield as well, though Bhattacharjee did not feature in the final. That was something he made up for in 1947, his penultimate year for his dream team, where he featured in the line-up that lifted the shield.

In between, Bhattacharjee had also become close to some Mohun Bagan players and officials. They had been after him for a long time, luring him with the promise of a permanent place in the line-up, something that was never guaranteed in East Bengal.

“Bagan stalwarts like Gostha Pal, Balai Chatterjee and Abhilash Ghosh, who had scored in the 1911 IFA Shield final, were like family friends and used to visit often. On one occasion, I had even signed with Mohun Bagan but was very restless after that and withdrew my name,” said the old man shaking his head.

“It was the biggest blunder of my career and I half regret it. It’s difficult to explain. In East Bengal, I played with icons whose pictures I used to cut out of newspapers only a few years ago. I was well loved in the club, which was like a family. All that prevented me from taking the final step.”

After his final season for East Bengal, Bhattacharjee took up a job with Eastern Railway and joined its coaching programme along with legendary soccer coach Bagha Shome.

“At that time Bagan had a coach in Balai Chatterjee, ER had Shome, Bally Pratibha had Langcha Mitra but East Bengal never had a coach. In 1961, the officials of the team approached me with an offer to take up the position as I was into football training and I became its first coach,” said Bhattacharjee as if it was no big deal.

The recruitment worked for the team and it won both the league and the shield, Bhattacharjee completing a rare double of achieving the feat both as player and coach.

Former India right-winger Sukumar Samajpati, who was in the 1961 East Bengal side, said Bhattacharjee played a very important part in the club’s success that year.

“He told us the simplest of things, like how important it was to know your strengths, to take advantage of them, and weaknesses, to work on them. He treated all the players equally and that somehow resulted in tremendous team spirit, which was us our main weapon that year.”

But the ER authorities, his employers, who also had a team that played in the top league, were not amused and threatened to transfer him, forcing him to end his stint as EB coach. Bhattacharjee, however, went back to assisting Bagha Shome with the ER side till 1974, unable to stay away from the sport.

Apart from coaching these sides, Bhattacharjee also coached the Narendrapur Ramakrishna Mission boys from 1959 to ’79 and youngsters at the Veterans’ Club from 1964 to ’84.

One of the luminaries to come out of RKM was centre forward Pradip Dutta, who went on to play for India.

Bhattacharjee was also the coach of a new team — Tollygunge Agragami, from the early ’60s to ’71, when they played the IFA Shield final. He also coached Kalighat.

The toughest assignment, according to the grand old man, was training the first Bengal women’s team for a tournament held in Lucknow, as most of the girls didn’t know anything about the game when he started working with them.

His Midas touch, of course, won Bengal the coveted title and got him the job of the first Indian women’s coach.

Shanti Mullick, who was in the first Bengal and India women’s teams, recounted: “I used to play handball. That’s the closest I had come to playing football. Sushilda not only taught us the game but was more like a combination of father and mother, training and taking care of us when we toured. He readied us for the highly demanding world of competitive sport.”

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