ISL: Jamshedpur edge past Mumbai City
Mumbai, Oct 2 : Jamshedpur FC lived up to their early pre-season promise with a methodical 2-0 victory over Mumbai City FC in their Indian Super League opener at the Mumbai Football Arena here on Tuesday.
In a fiercely-contested affair, Mario Arques' 28th-minute header and Pablo Morgado's second in the fifth minute of added time proved to be the difference.
It was the visitors who started the match in a much more confident manner and a move involving Jerry Mawihmingthanga almost paid off in the 10th minute.
The Jamshedpur winger played a one-two with Memo before crossing the ball across the box. Sergio Cidoncha's attempted bicycle kick failed to come off before Carlos Calvo's shot was deflected out for a corner.
The resulting set-piece saw Calvo find himself in a great position to score once again but the Spaniard blasted his effort over the bar.
Mumbai were finding it difficult to make any real forays into the Jamshedpur box and the visitors deservedly took the lead in the 28th minute through a Mario Arquesa's header.
The Spanish midfielder's attempted shot from 25 yards out initially found its way to Calvo on the left-flank. Calvo crossed the ball back across the face of goal and Arques, who had made a brilliant run, cushioned in a perfect header from a tight angle.
Cesar Ferrando's men almost doubled their lead immediately after the restart through a Calvo corner.
An unmarked Tiri rose well to meet the excellently taken corner but his header was cleared off the line by Lucian Goian.
Mumbai should have levelled matters minutes later following a midfield scramble which ultimately saw Sanju Pradhan thread a brilliant through ball between Jamshedpur's two central defenders to release Rafael Bastos on goal.
With just goalkeeper Subhasish Roy to beat, the Brazilian somehow failed to get a proper connection on the ball and the meek attempt was easily dealt with by the Jamshedpur custodian.
Subhasish though, was required to be at his very best around the hour mark after Goian's punted ball forward was flicked on to the path of Modou Sougou.
The Senegalese striker's perfect header seemed destined to nestle into goal before Subhasish pulled off an excellent dive to tip the ball over for a corner.
Mumbai thought they had got their equalizer in the 77th minute after Rafique's header from a cross from the left-flank beat Subhasish.
Much to the dismay of the home fans and the coach, the goal was ruled out for offside. Another 'goal' in the 85th minute was again flagged for offside.
There was a goal, finally, but at the other end.
In added time when Mumbai pressed more men forward, a quick break saw Sergio Cidoncha release debutant Pablo Morgado Blanco down the right flank. And the substitute sealed all three points for his side with a thumping finish which beat Amrinder Singh from a tight angle.
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Oath-taking ceremony of first BJP govt in Bengal on May 9; Modi, Shah likely to attend
Kolkata (PTI): The oath-taking ceremony of the first BJP government in West Bengal will be held at Brigade Parade Ground here on May 9, marking the saffron camp’s arrival in power in a state after decades on the political fringes.
The ceremony, scheduled to begin at 10 am, is expected to witness the presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Union Home Minister Amit Shah, BJP president Nitin Nabin, several Union ministers and chief ministers of BJP- and NDA-ruled states, party sources said.
“The new BJP government will take oath on May 9 at 10 am at Brigade Parade Ground,” state BJP president Samik Bhattacharya announced on Wednesday.
Even as the BJP leadership kept its cards close to the chest on the chief ministerial face, Leader of the Opposition Suvendu Adhikari has emerged as a frontrunner in internal discussions after cementing his position as the party’s principal mass leader in Bengal politics.
Adhikari, once among Mamata Banerjee’s closest lieutenants and a key architect of the TMC’s rural expansion in districts such as Purba Medinipur, crossed over to the BJP ahead of the 2021 assembly elections and went on to defeat Banerjee in Nandigram in one of Bengal’s fiercest political battles.
Five years later, he again found himself at the centre of Bengal’s political churn by beating Banerjee in her own turf at Bhabanipur by over 15,000 votes.
Other names for the CM post doing the rounds include Bhattacharya, Union minister Sukanta Majumdar and former Rajya Sabha MP Swapan Dasgupta, though party insiders indicated that the leadership was inclined towards projecting a “bhumiputra” face rooted in Bengal’s linguistic and cultural ethos.
During the campaign, Shah repeatedly asserted that the BJP’s chief minister in Bengal would be a “son of the soil”, born and educated in the state, in an attempt to blunt the TMC’s sustained attack that the BJP represented an “outsider” political culture alien to Bengal’s social and intellectual traditions.
The BJP bagged 207 of the 294 assembly seats in the recently concluded elections, ending the Trinamool Congress’s uninterrupted 15-year rule and scripting the saffron party’s biggest breakthrough in a state where it once struggled to open its electoral account.
Significantly, the swearing-in ceremony will be held on the 25th day of Baisakh in the Bengali calendar — observed across the state as Rabindra Jayanti, the birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore — lending the event a deeper cultural symbolism.
According to BJP leaders, the choice of the date is aimed at embedding the party’s historic rise within Bengal’s cultural imagination and countering the long-standing perception battle over identity and belonging.
Over the last decade, the BJP has steadily attempted to appropriate and reinterpret icons of Bengal’s cultural nationalism — from Tagore and Swami Vivekananda to Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose and Syama Prasad Mookerjee — as part of a broader ideological effort to expand its emotional and political footprint in the state.
Party insiders said the leadership was also conscious of the need to balance Bengal’s competing regional aspirations while choosing the chief ministerial face, with discussions also taking place around whether greater representation should be accorded to north Bengal, a region where the BJP has made substantial electoral gains over successive elections.
A meeting of the newly elected BJP MLAs has been convened on May 8 evening, party sources said, though the leadership remained tight-lipped over the final choice.
The Brigade Parade Ground ceremony is expected to mark not merely a transfer of power, but a defining moment in Bengal’s political history, the culmination of the BJP’s long ideological and organisational march from the margins to the centre of power in a state that had for decades resisted the saffron surge seen elsewhere in India.
