2023 was a truly memorable year for Indian sport. With so much having happened, ESPN India picks ten images that tell the story of the most stunning moments we witnessed over the year. Our ninth pick is a moment when Bengaluru's Kanteerava Stadium sang Vande Mataram in unison post India's win over Kuwait in the SAFF Championships.
You've heard Bankim Chandra Chatterjee's Vande Mataram a million times. You probably love it, and you may even love AR Rahman's reimagining of the classic (with lyrics by Mehboob Kotwal) even more. You've definitely heard that version enough times in your lifetime to know just how it goes. You'd have never, though, heard it sung quite like this.
26,380 people (official attendance; could have been a bit more) packed into the Kanteerava stadium in Bengaluru, orchestrated by no one individual, just a massive collective voice going "Maa tujhe salaam...", as they serenaded the nation and her senior men's football team. Ah.
Cutting across club loyalties and rising above league football's tribal pettiness, fans from across came together as a "non-traditional" football centre rose to the occasion while India beat Kuwait (on penalties) in the 2023 SAFF Championship final. The spectators had been boisterous throughout the game, chanting the names of the players on the field, screaming the more generic "Indiaaa! Indiaaaa!" but their rendition of Vande Mataram at the end was truly special.
Just listen to it:
Goosebumps at the Kanteerava ��
��: @AnirudhMenon89 pic.twitter.com/wOuZpM1KKh
- ESPN India (@ESPNIndia) July 4, 2023
This was late, late on a Tuesday night. To get to the stadium itself had been a pain -- Bengaluru police issuing an unprecedented traffic advisory because of the football -- but this late on, and getting out would be a pain too with public transport shutting down to barebones operations. Yet not one soul of the 26,380 seemed to have moved. And every one of them seemed to be singing.
The whole summer had been building up to this moment, India's wins in the Intercontinental Cup were emphatic, and their performance in the SAFF Championship was rather unusually attractive. This was a team playing pretty neat football in possession and running their socks off out of it: the kind of team that the public can get behind.
And get behind they did. That single frame of the crowd singing the modern version of the national song encapsulated the positivity around the team (at the time), and the sport's ever-increasing popularity as the summer of success fed both the loyalist and the newly converted with the kind of adrenaline rush that everyone craves.
As a feel-good moment for Indian sports, this was right up there. In fact, the sound of the Kanteerava that night so perfectly captured the general awesomeness of a peoples-being one-with-sport that advertisers would go on to overlay the sound of this crowd singing over visuals of the crowds at the cricket World Cup held in the country later that year. Now, isn't that something?