Fair play: Hockey stumps cricket, for now
By Jitendra Nath Misra
The inaugural Hockey India League has shown that hockey is fun, hip, and even glamorous. The talent on display and the spectator- friendly format created a carnival grandeur, almost a sporting fantasy.
As if in a descent from a dream, we had the world’s best players, coaches, umpires and hockey managers come together, to choreograph world- class hockey of frenetic pace. There were 34 games in 28 days, something unheard of at this level.
Where did we have 59 Olympians, 45 World Cup players and 56 Champions Trophy players from 5 continents and 9 countries play in one hockey league? Apart from 70 players from India, there were 20 from Australia and 9 from the Netherlands alone, and players from England, Germany, Spain, New Zealand, South Africa, Argentina and Malaysia as well. Ranchi Rhinos alone had players from 8 countries.
The league’s cosmopolitanism was matched by a crackling contest. As Michael Nobbs, the coach of the Indian men’s team told me, the criss- crossing travel to distant venues, and the short recovery time between matches made this the hardest tournament in the world. Victorious Ranchi’s composed resilience in the finals sent 15,000 adoring home fans into delirium. “I have never experienced this before,” said FIH Player of the Year 2012 Moritz Fuerste at the awards ceremony.
In the Delhi games I watched, the presence of so many youths was heartening, with festoons and flags, I Love Hockey stickers, and chants of paeans to their favourite players and teams. All this, while the Indian and English cricket teams were playing a series of one- day internationals. The League had 14.6 million television viewers for the 6 matches during the first week, 1.7 times the viewers for the UEFA Euro 2012, and 24 times the viewers for the I- League. Is hockey at last able to offer a parallel sporting universe to cricket?
To make hockey work, ordinary people need to understand its nuances. In India, we have not often seen live coverage of the same hockey game in Hindi and English on two different channels. Despite its fall, Indian sports editors carve regular space for hockey stories. In contrast, hockey faded from the sports pages of British newspapers soon after the London Olympics, even though Great Britain is fourth- ranked in the world.
Hockey’s growing internationalism is evident in the coverage the League got in leading hockey- playing nations. It was telecast live on Australia’s Fox 2 sports channel, and One World Sports of the U.S. The League was live streamed on You Tube and America ONE Sports, and had 2,400 Twitter followers. According to Dr. Narinder Batra, Secretary General of Hockey India, it was telecast in 83 countries in 5 continents. FIH President Leandro Negre noted a good following in Europe.
Hockey will thrive if we create an anecdotal history around the sport’s heart- warming moments. In the League the players played hard, but not ugly. My heroes were Sardar Singh and Moritz Fuerste. While Singh led by example and made his power hockey look sublime, Fuerste couched his brilliance in endearing human stories. Who could have expected Fuerste, a double Olympics gold medallist, to hug the teenager, Mandeep Singh, after Singh had missed an easy scoring opportunity against Delhi in the finals?
The League has barrelled through the month to a glittering climax. In the coming years it will lose the feel of being a spectacle, as the contests become psychologically searing. But it has bonded the hockey fraternity in one of the most multinational and multicultural events that was not the Olympics or the World Cup. But longevity requires careful nurturing. After a fine start, the League will need to lure the smart phone generation to taking time off to celebrate our beautiful sport. But first, let us salute Hockey India for pulling off such a daring feat.
— Jitendra Nath Misra is an Indian Foreign Service officer. The views are his own, not those of the government of India.