When Gourav Mukhi came off the bench and scored Jamshedpur’s first equaliser in last night’s 2-2 draw against Bengaluru, he had set a new ISL record, or so everyone presumed.

Gourav, at just 16, was now the youngest player and scorer in the Indian Super League, and for that he earned the emerging player of the match, netting himself ₹25,000 and an an inspirational message from Tim Cahill – “This is the best moment of your life”.

It turns out those words may be the only truthful part of this whole debacle, as football fans watched on at the midfielder supposedly born this side of the century, with a thick handlebar moustache and a shock of blonde hair, collecting his oversized check, suspicions began growing about how genuine his new found claim to fame was.

True, he’s listed as 16 on the official Indian Super League website (a page, which at 9.30am was taken down) and his profile pages on Soccerway, World Football, and ESPN FC list the youngster’s birthday as May 4th 2002, making him indeed the tender age of just 16.

However, this data is almost certainly coming from the official ISL records, and given Mukhi’s murky history with his age on official documents, this can’t be blindly taken as the truth.

The striker was part of the Jharkhand side that won the National Under-15 Sub Junior Football Tournament in January 2015, hammering Goa 8-3 in the final, with Mukhi scoring five himself. Playing U15 over three and a half years ago would have made Mukhi at least 14 going into that tournament, so therefore the striker is at least 17 years of age.

However, having dazzled in the final, the real reason why the north-easteners did so well in that tournament didn’t take long to come out. In June of that year they were stripped of their title, banned from the following season’s Coca Cola cup, and fined one lakh, due to fielding overage players, including Mukhi, who all submitted fake birth certificates.

Mukhi is a child from an underprivileged background, so getting official documents and an actual age is difficult to determine, but given he was overage in that tournament, the so called 16-year-old would be at least of legal voting age today.

However, a profile in the Telegraph of India by Jayesh Thaker has the ISL’s newly crowned youngest scorer at the ripe age of 28 (before naming him as a ‘youth’ later on in the article), and goes through the many years of toil at local level before being spotted by Tata Steel in the JSA Premier Division and given his chance at ISL level, hardly the trajectory of an up-and-coming superstar.

If what the evidence suggests is true, and Mukhi is far older than his ISL forms claim, then it would take some of the shine off a fantastic performance, and leave the league with egg on their face.

Mukhi is a boy from humble beginnings who got his chance and seized it on the biggest stage. For a story, that’s more than enough.

Kevin Galvin

@kjgalvin93