Fog, floodlights and the 135th IndianOil Durand Cup: Manipur's quiet football empire
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Oinam Bembem Devi
I have never been to Andro, a village strung along the Nongmaiching hills some twenty-six kilometres from Imphal, on a match day without arriving before the fog lifts. This particular morning it sits low over the paddy, and the cattle move through it like something half-remembered. A woman in her sixties steps out of a thatched mud hut in a neon jacket and red sneakers, squints at the light, and watches a group of girls already stretching in the wet grass. She has been doing this for three decades. Her club has a name, AMMA FC, and a founder, Laibi Phanjoubam, for whom training doubles as something close to therapy. Talk drifts to homework, to chores, to whatever unease is moving through the district that week. It lessens our worries a bit, she has said. Nobody in Andro finds any of this remarkable. That, in the end, is the whole story.
Four hundred kilometres away, and one long football culture removed, the SAI Ground in Imphal filled up on the evening of 21 July 2026 for something grander, a Women's Exhibition Football Match between Kangla Warriors and Sangai Strikers, staged as the curtain raiser to the Imphal Chapter of the 135th IndianOil Durand Cup. I was one of the former players asked to stand pitch-side that evening, alongside the Hon'ble Minister for Youth Affairs & Sports, Government of Manipur, Shri Govindas Konthoujam, who arrived as Chief Guest, and Maj Gen Shubhankar Basu, SM, VSM, General Officer Commanding of the Red Shield Division, in a ground full of dignitaries who had clearly come because they wanted to, not because a calendar told them to.
There was a Pipe Band, the Durand Cup anthem, and a ceremonial kick-off from the Minister himself before the football took over. Ninety minutes stayed goalless, then Kangla Warriors won it on penalties, 3-2, to a roar that told you the SAI Ground had been waiting for exactly that. It is tempting to treat that evening, with its ministers and generals and pipe bands, as the story. It is really only the visible tip of it. The real story starts in places like Andro, and in a hundred villages like it, where nobody ever quite got the memo that women's football was supposed to play second fiddle to the men's game.
The arithmetic that shouldn't be possible
Manipur takes up a sliver of India, roughly a third of one per cent of the national population, squeezed against the Myanmar border. And yet since the Senior Women's National Football Championship began in earnest in the early 1990s, we have won it 23 times. Not contested. Not occasionally gate-crashed. Won. No other state is within shouting distance. When India lifted the SAFF Women's Championship earlier this year, nine of the twenty-three players who did it were Manipuri, drawn from a nation of one and a half billion people. Football people elsewhere reach for the word "pipeline" when this comes up, as though the state were a factory. It plays more like an inheritance.
It helps to know where that inheritance comes from, and it isn't a training manual. Imphal is home to Ima Keithel, the Mothers' Market, a five-hundred-year-old bazaar run entirely by women, thousands of them, trading everything from fish to fabric under a system passed down mother to daughter. It has survived colonial interference and, more than once, organised itself into open resistance when threatened. Where I come from, women have never needed convincing that a public square, whether it sells vegetables or hosts a football pitch, belongs to them by default rather than by permission.
The names that made the case
I grew up playing with the boys in my neighbourhood, against my father's wishes, sneaking out with my brothers running interference. When the tackles started leaving marks I couldn't explain at home, I took to training in full-length trousers, just to keep the peace at home. It isn't much of a story, really, and it gets told more than it deserves. What matters far more is that I was never the only one.
Ngangom Bala Devi is a name I say with real pride. She grew up in Irengbam, a small village in Bishnupur, kicking a ball from the age of four or five with her father and older brother cheering her on, and beating the local boys so often that nobody thought to make a fuss about it anymore. She went on to become the first Indian woman to sign for a professional club in Europe, playing for Rangers in Scotland, a door she opened that the rest of us are still walking through.
Ashalata Devi, from that same footballing soil, has captained the national side past a hundred caps, the kind of calm, commanding presence a team gets built around rather than one that merely finishes what others start.
Dangmei Grace, from a village near the Myanmar border, was the first girl there to even pick up the game, and did it with a kind of quiet nerve I still admire, her short hair and boyish look giving her a freedom around the village the other girls didn't have, one she used to go where she liked and play what she liked.
And Elangbam Panthoi Chanu, a goalkeeper out of Kakching district, became the first Indian footballer, man or woman, to turn professional in Australia, which is not a small thing for anyone to have done. None of them are outliers where I'm from. They are simply the ones the world happened to notice.
It is worth saying plainly, too, that none of this has come easily. Manipur is not an easy place to build a footballing career from, geographically remote, often difficult to travel out of for tournaments, short on the infrastructure that richer states take for granted. We have kept training anyway, season after season, on grounds that double as village commons. Somewhere between Andro's fog and Imphal's floodlights, football has kept functioning as one of the few things everyone still agrees is worth showing up for.
Where the next name comes from
Attention now turns, as it always does, to the Opening Ceremony at the Khuman Lampak Main Stadium, where the Imphal Chapter of the 135th IndianOil Durand Cup formally gets under way, with TRAU FC playing NEROCA FC in the first fixture of a tournament well into its second century. That is the part of the story the world will watch.
The part it won't be happening right now, somewhere past the edge of the floodlights, in a village whose name nobody outside the district could place on a map, much like mine once was. A girl is out on a scrap of pitch before the fog has fully lifted, in borrowed boots or none at all, playing a game nobody around her has ever thought to tell her wasn't hers. I know that girl. I was her once, and so was every teammate I have ever loved. Manipur's football has always worked this way, from the ground up, long before anyone with a microphone arrives to explain it, and long before anyone thought to ask a woman like me to write about it. It will very likely keep working that way long after this particular Durand Cup has come and gone, quietly producing the next name before the rest of the country has even learned to say the last one.
ABOUT DURAND CUP
A proud symbol of India's footballing legacy, the Durand Cup is Asia's oldest and the world's third-oldest football tournament. Organised by the Indian Army on behalf of the three Services, it has served as a breeding ground for India's finest football talent for well over a century.
The inaugural edition was held in Shimla in 1888 before the tournament moved to New Delhi in 1940. In 2019, the Durand Cup came under the aegis of the Eastern Command and shifted to Kolkata, the football heartland of the East and the headquarters of the Eastern Command. Since then, the tournament has expanded from a single-city competition into a multi-city, multi-state sporting spectacle while preserving the traditions and values that have defined it for more than 138 years.
The champions receive three iconic trophies—the Durand Cup and the Simla Trophy, both rolling honours, and the President's Cup, crafted afresh each year and presented to the winners for permanent keepsake.
I have never been to Andro, a village strung along the Nongmaiching hills some twenty-six kilometres from Imphal, on a match day without arriving before the fog lifts. This particular morning it sits low over the paddy, and the cattle move through it like something half-remembered. A woman in her sixties steps out of a thatched mud hut in a neon jacket and red sneakers, squints at the light, and watches a group of girls already stretching in the wet grass. She has been doing this for three decades. Her club has a name, AMMA FC, and a founder, Laibi Phanjoubam, for whom training doubles as something close to therapy. Talk drifts to homework, to chores, to whatever unease is moving through the district that week. It lessens our worries a bit, she has said. Nobody in Andro finds any of this remarkable. That, in the end, is the whole story.
Four hundred kilometres away, and one long football culture removed, the SAI Ground in Imphal filled up on the evening of 21 July 2026 for something grander, a Women's Exhibition Football Match between Kangla Warriors and Sangai Strikers, staged as the curtain raiser to the Imphal Chapter of the 135th IndianOil Durand Cup. I was one of the former players asked to stand pitch-side that evening, alongside the Hon'ble Minister for Youth Affairs & Sports, Government of Manipur, Shri Govindas Konthoujam, who arrived as Chief Guest, and Maj Gen Shubhankar Basu, SM, VSM, General Officer Commanding of the Red Shield Division, in a ground full of dignitaries who had clearly come because they wanted to, not because a calendar told them to.
There was a Pipe Band, the Durand Cup anthem, and a ceremonial kick-off from the Minister himself before the football took over. Ninety minutes stayed goalless, then Kangla Warriors won it on penalties, 3-2, to a roar that told you the SAI Ground had been waiting for exactly that. It is tempting to treat that evening, with its ministers and generals and pipe bands, as the story. It is really only the visible tip of it. The real story starts in places like Andro, and in a hundred villages like it, where nobody ever quite got the memo that women's football was supposed to play second fiddle to the men's game.
The arithmetic that shouldn't be possible
Manipur takes up a sliver of India, roughly a third of one per cent of the national population, squeezed against the Myanmar border. And yet since the Senior Women's National Football Championship began in earnest in the early 1990s, we have won it 23 times. Not contested. Not occasionally gate-crashed. Won. No other state is within shouting distance. When India lifted the SAFF Women's Championship earlier this year, nine of the twenty-three players who did it were Manipuri, drawn from a nation of one and a half billion people. Football people elsewhere reach for the word "pipeline" when this comes up, as though the state were a factory. It plays more like an inheritance.
It helps to know where that inheritance comes from, and it isn't a training manual. Imphal is home to Ima Keithel, the Mothers' Market, a five-hundred-year-old bazaar run entirely by women, thousands of them, trading everything from fish to fabric under a system passed down mother to daughter. It has survived colonial interference and, more than once, organised itself into open resistance when threatened. Where I come from, women have never needed convincing that a public square, whether it sells vegetables or hosts a football pitch, belongs to them by default rather than by permission.
The names that made the case
I grew up playing with the boys in my neighbourhood, against my father's wishes, sneaking out with my brothers running interference. When the tackles started leaving marks I couldn't explain at home, I took to training in full-length trousers, just to keep the peace at home. It isn't much of a story, really, and it gets told more than it deserves. What matters far more is that I was never the only one.
Ngangom Bala Devi is a name I say with real pride. She grew up in Irengbam, a small village in Bishnupur, kicking a ball from the age of four or five with her father and older brother cheering her on, and beating the local boys so often that nobody thought to make a fuss about it anymore. She went on to become the first Indian woman to sign for a professional club in Europe, playing for Rangers in Scotland, a door she opened that the rest of us are still walking through.
Ashalata Devi, from that same footballing soil, has captained the national side past a hundred caps, the kind of calm, commanding presence a team gets built around rather than one that merely finishes what others start.
Dangmei Grace, from a village near the Myanmar border, was the first girl there to even pick up the game, and did it with a kind of quiet nerve I still admire, her short hair and boyish look giving her a freedom around the village the other girls didn't have, one she used to go where she liked and play what she liked.
And Elangbam Panthoi Chanu, a goalkeeper out of Kakching district, became the first Indian footballer, man or woman, to turn professional in Australia, which is not a small thing for anyone to have done. None of them are outliers where I'm from. They are simply the ones the world happened to notice.
It is worth saying plainly, too, that none of this has come easily. Manipur is not an easy place to build a footballing career from, geographically remote, often difficult to travel out of for tournaments, short on the infrastructure that richer states take for granted. We have kept training anyway, season after season, on grounds that double as village commons. Somewhere between Andro's fog and Imphal's floodlights, football has kept functioning as one of the few things everyone still agrees is worth showing up for.
Where the next name comes from
Attention now turns, as it always does, to the Opening Ceremony at the Khuman Lampak Main Stadium, where the Imphal Chapter of the 135th IndianOil Durand Cup formally gets under way, with TRAU FC playing NEROCA FC in the first fixture of a tournament well into its second century. That is the part of the story the world will watch.
The part it won't be happening right now, somewhere past the edge of the floodlights, in a village whose name nobody outside the district could place on a map, much like mine once was. A girl is out on a scrap of pitch before the fog has fully lifted, in borrowed boots or none at all, playing a game nobody around her has ever thought to tell her wasn't hers. I know that girl. I was her once, and so was every teammate I have ever loved. Manipur's football has always worked this way, from the ground up, long before anyone with a microphone arrives to explain it, and long before anyone thought to ask a woman like me to write about it. It will very likely keep working that way long after this particular Durand Cup has come and gone, quietly producing the next name before the rest of the country has even learned to say the last one.
ABOUT DURAND CUP
A proud symbol of India's footballing legacy, the Durand Cup is Asia's oldest and the world's third-oldest football tournament. Organised by the Indian Army on behalf of the three Services, it has served as a breeding ground for India's finest football talent for well over a century.
The inaugural edition was held in Shimla in 1888 before the tournament moved to New Delhi in 1940. In 2019, the Durand Cup came under the aegis of the Eastern Command and shifted to Kolkata, the football heartland of the East and the headquarters of the Eastern Command. Since then, the tournament has expanded from a single-city competition into a multi-city, multi-state sporting spectacle while preserving the traditions and values that have defined it for more than 138 years.
The champions receive three iconic trophies—the Durand Cup and the Simla Trophy, both rolling honours, and the President's Cup, crafted afresh each year and presented to the winners for permanent keepsake.