At such a time when Indian hockey got its first `Dronacharya’, an award by the government of India for recognition of coaches in their field of activity, I don’t find any note of jubiliation among the lover of the game.

Gurdiyal Singh Bhangu, whose contribution in the realm of coaching is largely professing sycophancy to perfection got the rarest of rare awards thanks to manipulative politics that has come to mark the award this time arouond.

For those uninitiated, let me tell you Bhangu at present serves in the National Institute of Sports as head of Hockey Department. He was assistant coach for Balkrishan Singh in the early 90s for about one year. Indian hockey reached 7th position at Barcelona Olympics.

Then in only his second and last duty for the country, he trained for about one year women team that won the Silver in the 1998 Asian Games. The team he has got was the one developed for four years by one M.K. Kaushik and two years subsequently by one Col. Balbir Singh. It was in the duo’s spell, women hockey rose to become a force. Bhangu only reaped benefits of their hard work at the Asian Games by being there in there in the nick of time. At least had he built on from there for further successes, I would not have hesistated a wee bit to applaud him. But what he did subsequently was nothing but damaging the country’s honour.

The small measure of success at Asian level has seemingly spoilt his thinking. Next job he did was to disrespect and systamatically remove the senior girls. He sidelined Sandeep Kaur, who led India in the Utrecht World Cup just to push his kin, Amandeep Kaur. When the senior girls brought his attention to such things, he not only catigated them but did everything against them. Ultimately, the senior girls decided not to continue with the preparatory camp.

So he packed his team for the Milton Keynes Olympics Qualifier(2000) with new faces. When the government was reluctant to clear such an inexperienced team he gave in writting to the effect that his ‘finds’ are equal in all respect to those dropped girls. What happened at Milton Keyness? The pre-tournament favourites failed to win even single match, finishing bottom of the table. A Sub-Committee of the Indian Women Hockey Federation, which went into the reasons of the failure, flatly pointed at his indifference to senior girls and recommended his summary removal. So, he was out. A sureshot India failed to be in the company of Olympics because of all these things.

A person who the Federation considered misleading them and and because of that removed him from the coaching, is now ‘Dronocharya’! Why was he selected? I guess the government wanted to give the award to a person in their Institute. I do not think any other reason for beyond this. M.K. Kaushik coached Indian boys for the Asian Games gold that has come to India after a gap of 32 years, but he is ignored. Balkrishan Singh trained the Moscow Olympics Indians and three other Olympics teams, but not found suitable for the job.