Hope World Cup show is not affected

STICKWORK

GURBUX SINGH

We might as well start a brawl and the last stakeholders standing can fill the Hockey India chair. And since it appears that the players at the World Cup camp themselves have leadership issues, it will probably be a cataclysmic cleansing of Indian hockey. That, for the moment, is thankfully not happening; what is going on, though, is unfortunate and it no longer seems anyone remembers we have a World Cup to play, and host, in three weeks.

The recent Hockey India (HI) meetings have seen the officials fall just short of cursing and swearing in getting their point across. And I have to say that the Lord’s name is being taken in vain because there has been no improvement in the state of affairs.

In a few weeks from now the best in the world would have arrived here looking to crown the best among them and Indian hockey would be represented by an ad hoc dispensation with a questionable mandate. There is little to suggest that the IOA understands the urgency of the situation; the elections that have been deferred thrice now have been slapped by one stay order after another and it is difficult to predict when the ballots would be finally cast.

Fortunately, the crisis in the World Cup camp did not drag too long though the players’ mutiny was a setback we would have done well to avoid.

In the captaincy crisis gripping the camp now, the players have shown the good sense not to strike practice. They would live to regret it if they did any such thing. So, the boys better be practising hard. Off the field India has become a laughing stock in the world of hockey; any humiliation on it will cause further damage to the sport in the country.

That the dice should be so loaded before a major engagement is undesirable. Being the host nation for a world meet is pressure enough. About the chaos in the establishment it has surprisingly been created by the very people who had disbanded the Indian Hockey Federation (IHF) on grounds of mismanagement. The IOA had stepped in to clean the mess but now finds itself neck deep in a bog of its own making.

What is worse, power hungry officials who have planted themselves in office are trying to take advantage of the situation in order to perpetuate their stay. And they would have pulled it off had it not been for the intervention of the government and the public outrage at the farce that is going on in the name of administration in Indian hockey.

I think the people still remember the eight Olympic gold medals and everybody wants to see corrective action taken to restore the national game in its pride of place.

It is hard to believe that mandarins and politicians with such wide experience in the running of sport lack the ability to hammer hockey into shape. What is lacking is the will. It is almost as if Suresh Kalmadi, Lalit Bhanot, Narinder Batra, Rajiv Mehta and their visible and not-so-visible associates are deliberately letting the problem fester.

I only hope our World Cup show is not affected by the goings on in the hockey establishment.