India too big a risk, says hockey great
by
David Sygall
March 8, 2009:
THE hockey World Cup and Commonwealth Games, scheduled to be staged in India next year, are now in serious doubt and any security assurances given by authorities can no longer be counted on, according to hockey legend Ric Charlesworth.
Charlesworth says the terrorist attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore in Pakistan last week had vindicated Australian hockey’s decision not to tour Pakistan for most of the past decade, and the only reason Australia kept sending lower-tier cricket teams there, such as Australia A, was to satisfy the International Cricket Council.
Charlesworth, a former first-class cricketer, current Kookaburras coach and a sports and performance consultant, lived in the northern Indian city of Chandigarh last year working as a technical advisor to Indian hockey, but said he decided to end his stint there mainly because of the frightening security situation.
“We’ve now got to be concerned about the whole subcontinent,” Charlesworth said. “Pakistan is a rogue state, I understand, but there was the attack in Mumbai and, when I was in India, bombs were going off in Delhi, in Hyderabad … From my experience there, I just don’t see how you can manage such a large population for big events.”
Charlesworth said the hockey fraternity was widely panned for refusing to send its players to Pakistan, but that the decision was the correct one.
“We decided not to go to the Champions Trophy in 2004 because of security concerns and we were criticised for it,” he said. “We haven’t been sending our hockey teams to Pakistan for most of this decade now. Cricket has still held ‘A’ tours there, but they did that because they had to keep cosy with the ICC.
“We were invited to a tournament in the north of India in January this year. We didn’t go for various reasons, including (the attack) in Mumbai. This event in Pakistan will now justify why we stopped going to the region at all.
“The other side of the story is that bombs went off in London too, but Pakistan is in a league of its own. What we’ve seen now is a particular group of athletes being targeted.”
Cricket is the main sport on the subcontinent, but hockey is second. Like cricket, hockey relies on a strong presence in Pakistan and India. Charlesworth said he had played in Pakistan regularly in the past, but that the situation today was very different. “The national hockey stadium, which holds twice as many people as Gaddafi Stadium (where the Sri Lankan cricketers were heading when the attack occurred), is just opposite,” he said. “I know the area very well. I played hockey professionally there and went to Pakistan every year during the 1980s. It’s much different now. The whole region is different now.
“I was living in India last year and one of the reasons I left was because I believed the security situation had deteriorated. My kids were going to school with armed escorts. That was a fact of life in Chandigarh, which is considered a very liveable city in India, even though it’s only an hour to the border.
“How do you make Delhi safe for the Commonwealth Games?” Charlesworth asked.
“That’s next year and we have our World Cup there next year as well. These are questions people are going to have to start asking. My feeling is that for the Commonwealth Games, they would lock down all the streets, similar to what they did for the Olympics in Beijing. Ordinary people won’t be anywhere near the athletes or the competition.
“The problem for the hockey World Cup, however, is that they won’t be able to close down the streets. No doubt there will be assurances given, but I find it very difficult to feel that things will be under control.”
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