Football
ISL: Congress disrupt Mumbai City FC practice in Nagoa
The Goa Pradesh Congress Committee (GPCC) threatened to disrupt the Indian Super League (ISL) on Wednesday as they stopped the Mumbai City FC team bus on their way to the Nagoa Panchayat ground for practice in a sign of protest against the usage of vehicles registered outside Goa in the transportation of teams.
This comes on the back of a recent conflict between local transport operators and the organisers of the ISL where the former threatened legal action against the league for using vehicles from other states for transportation within the state.
Trouble erupted when a group of protesters confronted the Mumbai City entourage just as they were about to reach the training venue earlier today. The protestors noticed that the team bus was a vehicle registered in Uttar Pradesh while another car that was carrying a few non-playing staff had a license plate from Delhi.
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This initiated a war of words between the two groups with the protestors eventually raising slogans in front of the team bus to express their displeasure over most of the contracts related to the league being outsourced to other states.
The GPCC members also voiced their displeasure over the fact that local vendors had been ignored in almost all of the important facets like logistics, operations, manual labour, transport, power and the likes. They claimed that this was something that Goa Sports Minister Manohar Ajgaonkar had categorically said would not happen when he promised a few days back that hosting the entire tournament would bring a lot of business for local vendors.
With the league starting in just two days, it remains to be seen how the ISL and FSDL tackle this issue and if this has any bearing on actual match days once the season starts.
Also read: ISL Pre-season friendlies: Mumbai City beat Bengaluru FC, all results and fixtures
