Let us resume our account of the pilgrim’s progress; after a stay of nine months in Bijnor dotted with hockey matches and Mushairas – those were spacious times when official work was relieved by recreational sorties – I left for Moradabad, Despite my protest to Hague, the Collector, that I belonged to the town, he insisted on my joining, Now Hague was the son of Sir Harry Hague, Governor of U.P. He was an excellent long distance runner and a meritorious football player. But our association was short-lived. He was soon transferred and replaced by Hardy who was as remote from sports activities as the South Pole is from the North Pole. I soon followed Hague out of Moradabad to Bulandshahr where Rai Bahadur Ram Babu Saxena, the author of the history of Urdu literature, beckoned me.
Bulandshahr, like Bijnor, is a small town at a distance of about 44 miles from Delhi. Here I had the opportunity to indulge my fancy both for hockey and Urdu poetry. Being a bachelor I made myself comfortable in Bulandshahr Club. Ensconced there I could sally out in the afternoons to play Tennis on the Club’s lush green lawns. I constituted a Collectorate Hockey Team on the pattern tried with considerable success in Bijnor. This team too, because of unbridled enthusiasm on the part of office scribes, shot into prominence as the best in the district. The other two good hockey teams in town were the DAV College and the Islamis College teams. I have perhaps omitted to mention that following the pattern of police teams, I had started playing as Centre-forward. One of the matches played on the Islamia College ground is still fresh in my memory. Justice James of the Allahabad High Court had been invited to give away the prizes. I took a ball from about mid-field, swerved to the right, gained about 25 yards of precious ground, dodged another opponent near the D and scored a resounding goal. It incidentally decided the fate of the tournament. We annexed the trophy and and got generous encomiums from Justice James who was a connoisseur of hockey. The 3 ½ years that I spent in Bulandshahar under the protection and care of Dr. R.B. Saxena are still fondly remembered. I have lost track of most of my team mates except Sheoraj Singh, A typcal Jat from that Jat-dominated district, Kushalpal Singh, another Jat student who married into a wealthy family in Delhi and is now the owner of the vast building enterprise known as DLF. He used to be our Left-winger. The third person whom I remember is Abdul Washeed Khan who was a tube-well operator than and enjoyed an enviable health. He used to play as Centre-half. I am sad to report that Sheoraj Singh who followed his father’s profession and became an advocate has assumed an unsportsmanlike girth, and Abdul Waheed Khan has suffered a stroke with whose aftermath he is still grappling. Some of the other player migrated to Pakistan and some others just faded out. But memories do not die. My tight grip on hockey started lossening towards the end of my tenure as Sub Divisional Magistrate in Bulandshahar. The responsibilities increased and the British tradition of our-door and strenuous life for civil servants also petered out. I started spending more time on Tennis than on Hockey but the latter continued to be my first love.
Switching over now in time and space to the Sydeny Olympics, where we made a last-ditch effort to restore our primacy in hockey, we seem to have thrown away our main chance for winning an Olympic medal. The report in Sydney states ruefully.
“The eight-time champions threw away all their advantages, including skill and superior scoring power, to settle for a I-I draw with the Poles and finished third in the pool behind top-finishers Australia and runners-up South Korea.”
I do not know what happened to our coach, our captain and our strategists. It did not require any great insight to decide the strategy for the match against Poland. Since our entry into the Semi-Finals depended upon winning this match, our team should have gone all out from the word “Go” and should have continually raided the Polish goal. It did not matter at all that in this effort there was risk of our defence thinning out and succumbing to counter raids. Even if we had lost, say even by half a dozen goals, the consequence would have been about the same as the drawn match that we played against Poland. I have not the least doubt that there was safe margin between the two teams to justify concerted aggression and offence at the very outset. This would have paid a rich dividend. What is equally regrettable, we lost the next match to Britain. No Indian player in the heyday of Indian hockey would have thought that England could ever dream of beating India. We have been relegated to the seventh position in a tournament where eight teams participated. The postmortem will begin when the team comes back. Some familiar noises will be made and Indian hockey will settle down to a humdrum existence, sans zest sans enterprise. The prospects are anything but exciting. So much talent and such a poor performance.