No sooner had football’s Indian Super League announced its schedule than a lot of blabbering began in Kolkata about its derby battle being the focal point of the tournament’s forthcoming edition, with effusive outpourings suggesting a new experiment, like an antidote to baldness.

The exuberance, with seasoned campaigners allowing themselves to be foolishly tugged into the hollow chinwagging, was inexplicable if you thought of the ISL’s rapidly diminishing standing. A show reliant on has-beens from Africa, Europe and Latin America, it has added little to Indian football in terms of its global competitive appeal and strength.

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Brazil, or even Bangladesh, do not really quake in their boots when we are mentioned. Which is why the Indian game has stopped being taken seriously also at home.

And if the Kolkata derby is now designed to shore up the tournament’s sagging fortune, it would be idiotic to try to push the Kolkataderby-in-Goa pitch too far, given that only the egregiously ignorant ones in the thinning crowd at the stadium will fail to remember the simple fact that there have been any number of Mohun Bagan-East Bengal matches in places other than the eastern Indian metropolis when Indian football was not self-destructively centralised with competitions like the ISL or the I-League.

In 1972, East Bengal’s first triple-crown year, Mohun Bagan battled them gloriously in the Durand Cup and the Rovers Cup, in New Delhi and what was then Bombay, respectively, after conceding the IFA Shield final, which had been required to be replayed.

The Kolkata derby seldom failed to ignite a keen, spontaneous and countrywide curiosity in those days, when today’s artificial sales drive was not needed. But the All-India Football Federation began undermining the club game in 1977, when a pre-season competition of the best teams kicked off.

It was called the Federation Cup. If the traditional tournaments had unearthed fresh talents galore in a country without much scouting and youthnurturing, the sudden switchover portended a spectacular slide. It came about all right.

Later, as the AIFF hit upon one self-destructive wheeze after another, unveiling the National League, renaming it the ILeague and then looking impotently but indulgently on as its financial benefactors came up with the ISL, the rockbottom was hit.

The game is moribund today.

The IFA Shield hobbles, you have long stopped hearing anything about the Rovers Cup and the Durand Cup has moved hither and thither eventually to find a sanctuary in Bengal. But that the ISL has had to pin its hopes of staying relevant on the Kolkata duo is an acknowledgement of the failure of Indian football’s socalled New Wave.

The Kolkata derby will not save the ISL as it still feels – and is – like an enterprise whose central objective is not boosting Indian football. One high-drama scene can hardly save a show planned ambitiously, but not very intelligently.