There was a time in Indian football when defenders were expected to be rough and tough – they would often adopt unfair means to stop the attackers and it would be accepted as natural, as part of the game. In the early 1960s, three of the finest defenders in Indian football, all powerfully built and played for Mohun Bagan, were Jarnail Singh, TA Rehman and Mrintunjoy Banerjee, and the opponents dreaded them sometimes more because of their physical intimidation than their skills. The law was not too demanding and that there was no yellow card in football was yet another advantage for defenders.

But there were some defenders, who chiefly depended on their skills and rarely used physical power to tame the attackers on the pitch. The leading light of this breed was Arun Ghosh, one of the finest central defenders in the history of Indian football and a hero of the 1962 Jakarta Asian Games where India won the gold medal under the captaincy of Chuni Goswami. While the original central defender Jarnail Singh was moved to the position of centre forward by the coach SA Rahim in the semi-finals and final, Ghosh did a remarkable job to keep the South Korean attackers at bay in the final.

Having played the Olympics in 1960 Rome only when he was just 19-year-old, Arun Ghosh was the pillar of Indian defence for nearly a dozen years and only stopped playing international football after the tour of Russia in 1971 where he was the captain. However, he was first made the captain in the 1968 Asian Cup qualifiers. Ghosh is also a great teacher – not many remember the fact that he was one of the two coaches of the India under-20 team, who won the Asian Youth Championship in Bangkok jointly with Iran in 1974. He was one of the assistant coaches in 1982 Asian Games in Delhi and the technical director of India between 1992 and 1994. Arun Ghosh was born on July 7, 1941.