The two get tickets from a group from Baguiati just before the match.

Two young men clad in the green and red colours of the Bangladesh flag were surrounded by camera crew on the road leading to the Club House entrance to the Eden Gardens on Friday afternoon.

“Ticket chai! Ticket chai! Durnitike prosroi debo na. Black-e ticket nebo na (We want tickets. We won’t indulge in corruption. We won’t buy tickets on the black market),” read a poster stuck to the outfit of one of them.

Murad Khondaker and Sajib Mollah had come from Bangladesh on Wednesday to watch the match but failed to get tickets.

“The online tickets were sold off. We tried buying from some agents but they were charging exorbitant rates. We are students and have limited cash,” said Khondaker, a final-year student of Bengali honours at a college in Gopalganj.

The two said they had tried their luck at several currency exchange centres and hotels in the New Market area. “But most of the places we went to did not have tickets. The people who did charged a price we could not afford,” said Khondaker.

Many Bangladeshi fans descended on the Eden Gardens on Friday. Quite a few of them passed by Khondaker and Mollah. Some even enquired what had happened but no one was able to help them.

A bus full of Bangladeshi dignitaries arrived in front of the stadium around 12.30pm. Egged on by TV journalists, Khondaker and Mollah went near the bus, showing their posters to the passengers.

The bus went straight to the parking lot near the Customs tent.

Dejected, the two friends went back to their original spot, asking every other spectator if they had an extra ticket.

Just before the match started, lady luck smiled on the two. A team of spectators from Baguiati came across Khondaker and Mollah. The group had six tickets but only four turned up.

“Please take the two spare tickets,” Bidula Bhattacharjee told Khondaker.

The Bangladeshis offered money but Bhattacharjee flatly refused. “You have come from so far.... How can we take money?” Mithun Chakraborty, another member of the group, told Mollah.

“We came on a bus via the Benapole border because we cannot afford a flight. We are living at a friend’s place in Dunlop. We have been coming to Eden Gardens for the past two days but in vain,” said Mollah, a resident of Faridpur.

“We have not done anything great. It is a normal human thing,” said Bhattacharjee, an assistant director of several Bengali films who directed Prem Amar 2 that released earlier this year.