Goa Team Sets Out On Exposure Tour
Panaji: Goa are on a hockey tour of Portugal. Yes, you’ve heard right. It’s hockey , not football.
For Goa, the whipping boys of Indian hockey , the trip is a bolt from the blue. It should and has taken a degree of benovelence to make it possible, especially given the hitherto comatose nature of the Goa Hockey Association.
Dr Susana De Souza, Director, Directorate of Sports and Youth Affairs, explained when contacted by the Times Of India: “We received an invitation from the Portuguese hockey association to take part in a hockey festival. The Goa government, considering it a special case within its cultural interaction with Portugal, is footing costs of travel and the Portuguese would meet hospitality costs.”
“It’s a good opportunity for our team and we must be positive about it especially because of the National Games Goa will host in 2011,” she added.
The first batch of players were to leave by bus to Mumbai on Saturday to catch their flight to Portugal, according De Souza who added the second batch would join them in Mumbai a day later.
The Goa Hockey Association have stopped a lot of flak in recent times especially from the Goa Olympic Association who have backed a group of hockey people ready to set up a new body in place of the ‘comatose’ association led by Herculano Dourado.
Co-incidentally or otherwise, GHA woke from their slumber to run an all-Goa tournament in May and followed that up with a training camp on the artificial surface at the Mahindra stadium, Mumbai, as pre-tour regimentation.
GHA president Herculano Dourado could not be contacted for comment on Saturday but earlier in the week the GHA president said his association was on the look out for possible opportunities to go abroad for training, probably in Portugal. Portugal compares poorly with its Iberian neighbour Spain and the wisdom of travelling to a nation ranked 41 in the world could be questioned. Especially when one considers the proximity of traditionally strong centres like Bangalore and Mumbai.
Is it that the colonial hangover that hovers over soccer has drifted over Goan hock ey as well? Or is that the GHA appreciate the fact that Portugal joined the Olympic hockey movement in the same year that the wizard Dhyan Chand displayed his magic on a global stage — the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics?!