Uthra Ganesan in Indian Express Blog
It’s that time of the year again. Between the months of April and June, Malaysia hosts the Sultan Azlan Shah hockey tournament, and for an invitational event, it attracts most of the best teams in the world, ensuring competitive matches and good preparation for the year ahead. The Indian team religiously participates in the tournament — sometimes it does well, often it doesn’t. But this year, after a 14-year gap, under a stop-gap coach and an ad-hoc hockey federation, a bunch of alleged ‘also rans’ have returned with the elusive trophy.
There is still a long way to go before India are back to being serious contenders in world hockey, but it would be tough to remember when the Indian team last went nine games without a loss — overall, they have lost just two of their 16 games this year.
How much does this recent track record change things? It won’t make overnight stars of this bunch of stick-wielders, and it won’t suddenly make the country think, dream and wholeheartedly follow the fortunes of the national team. But it could mean that, at last, the players can start hoping to play for more than just “pride” and “the love of the game”, which they have been doing for too many years now.
Maybe, just maybe, this win will ensure that when the hockey team next goes out to play (the Asia Cup in May), their results — both wins and defeats — will not get lost in a surfeit of IPL excitement.
1 Comment
If you really analyze our past performance, the IHF should be blamed for not picking up the right squad for Azlan Shah. Secondly, if you take it in right spirit of planning, IHF should be congratulated for having played the right role of selecting this tournament Azlan shah as a base for exposing the development squad players from time to time. Just take a glimpse of teams that represented India in Azlan Shah from 2001. The Indian team had barely completed the world cup qualifiers in 2001 and had no recovery time to go for azlan shah, hence IHF decided to send a second string with NS Sodhi for 2001 Azlan Shah. In 2002 Rajinder preferred to take the 2001 Junior world cup squad as a build up team. In 2004 the Juniors led by Harendra with two oldies namely Dhanraj and Baljit Dhillon went for the azlan shah. In 2005 Rajinder Junior picked up his players from Punjab Sindbank for the tour, in 2006 Carvalho prefered players from IOC, in 2008 Bansal brought his Junior squad with some mixed senior players retruning from Australia test series and in 2009 only we had the actual full Indian team for the tournament. If it is this approach… how could we fare well in past Azlan shah hockey tournaments.