Bihar, Services, Railways and Haryana qualified from Cluster one to four. The eight teams that finished in the top two positions in each group in the quarter-final league in 1985–86 were seeded directly to the quarter-final.
Prasanta Banerjee's goal went through the net and was awarded by the referee after consultation with the linesman B. S. Bisht. Maharashtra refused to play and there was a delay of seven minutes.
Referee: Badal Chakrabarty (Tripura), S. S. Salian (Maharashtra), P.K. Basu (Bengal)
After the match ended at 1–1 after 90 minutes, the crowd threw stones at the Kerala players. Thomas Sebastian was hit by a stone and needed medical attention. Debashis Roy's header appeared to have been saved on the goal line but was given as a goal.
The tournament was widely criticised for the lack of quality. Jarnail Singh who gave away the prizes said that he had never seen such a poor nationals. "I didn't see a single team playing methodical and organised football .. I'm really pained to see such a fall in the standard of Indian football". Sailen Manna, a former captain of Indian football team, said it was one of the worst nationals that he had ever seen. It didn't help that Punjab and Goa, two of the strongest team, could not make it to the semifinal.[16]
The refeering was also of low quality. In the Bengal-Kerala semifinal, the referee Badal Chakrabarty and a linesman P.K. Basu were Bengalis. India had seven referees in the international panel. None of them were used in the tournament because of the possibility that they would be required for the pre-Olympic matches. Eventually, they stood in neither set of matches.[16]
70'
