Bad Apples of Indian Hockey, bang them upside down

The country has not won a major World tournament in Hockey for the last thirty years, the chief reason being along with the turf, the game has changed a lot. Unlike the other countries who have been doing well, we have not changed much. Moreover, our country needs heroes to worship. It does not have an intrinsic sports culture like the West. My personal experience as a grassroots hockey worker is that it’s a hell of a job trying to persuade the parents to allow their kids to play hockey. The concept of recreational sport does not exist. “There’s no future in Hockey” is the common excuse. A sport is worth playing only if a career can be made out of it. If they play any game, it’s Cricket(nowadays Golf and Tennis are catching up) because it is projected as the only Sport by the media in India with its so called success stories which no self respecting sporting nation takes seriously and its multitude of heroes who would fail to qualify for any other sport at the international level.

Since the popularity of a sport in India depends on the success (actual or contrived, projected); the popularity of Hockey has thus gone down. The media treats Hockey shabbily. Added to that, there are no endorsements, no money, and consequently no Bollywood bimbettes running after the players to provide glamour. (Their only chance for getting their dues is to go on flash strike, as we saw before the Delhi World Cup).

How then did the present lot of top teams like Australia, Netherlands, Spain, Germany, England, USA (women’s hockey) reach where they are now? Teams like China, South Korea, Argentina and Belgium also threaten us regularly. They neither had the media/financial support nor any heroes to worship. They began with the introduction of scientific hockey at the grassroots level. Of course, the presence of 500 artificial turfs in Netherlands compared to 50 in India is an infrastructural disparity I admit. Beginning from the grassroots level, their players are introduced to the basic skills and the elementary scientific tactics and strategies through recreational 5 a side or 6 a side hockey and they come up through a structured system graduating into 9 a side and 11 a side hockey as they grow up. Coupled with it there is dietetic support customized for each budding player. All of this is not necessarily funded by the state. The club hockey systems in England, Netherlands, England, Australia, and USA cater for it.

Compare with this our scenario. There are no Hockey Clubs in India. Whatever Hockey exists at the school level is played on grass, that too in isolated pockets like Punjab, Coorg in Karnataka, Sundergarh in Orissa, Ranchi area in Jharkhand, some schools of Bombay, Madras, etc. (Hockey in Bengal, its birthplace in India disappeared with the migrating Anglo Indians). Beyond schools, there are the hostels of the SAI where the players from these isolated pockets of hockey are pooled. There they hone their skills and play the game as it was played thirty years ago. And hockey is still alive in the Armed forces and Govt organizations like the Railways, ONGC, SAIL, etc. But nowhere there is the culture of scientific hockey. Also, out of quantity comes quality. With the shrinking player base, the talent is disappearing fast.

The present set of players in our national team, therefore, has not come up through the structured system of junior level recreational leagues as in the West. Unlike their western counterparts, they have not been exposed to scientific training and synthetic turf from the grassroots level. Our school coaches are drillmasters, not hockey coaches. Physically they are not equal to the Westerners because of the nutritional gap, as dietetics doesn’t exist at our junior level. That they still manage to hold their own on many an occasion speaks volumes for their motivation and individual effort. Therefore to expect Ric Charlesworth or Jose Brasa to metamorphose the current lot into world-beaters with a podium finish in the World Cup or the Olympics is unrealistic. But the Indian coaches have fared far worse. They have presided over they slide in Indian hockey over the last thirty years and are simply no substitutes for the above named foreign coaches.

Being Government funded bodies with assured pay, etc, the SAI has become a den of non-working file pushing babus and corrupt top officials who siphon off Government sanctioned funds. The Indian Hockey Federation or for that matter the Hockey India (which elected the octagenerian Vidya Stokes over the decidedly more eligible Pargat Singh) is a sanctuary for the stooges of Suresh Kalmadi, like Narinder Batra. Add to them the fossils, ex Olympians of the seventies like Ajit Pal Singh, B P Govinda and Zafar Iqbal who have learnt nothing (of modern hockey), forgotten nothing (of their past laurels) and contributed nothing (to the growth of Hockey in India) and the deadly cocktail is complete. They will not allow any foreign coach more knowledgeable than them to last long with the Indian team. Hockey in India needs to be privatized with contracts, as Ric Charlesworth put it before quitting in disgust. But that is a tall order unless the media creates a storm like it did in when one skeleton after another started tumbling out of the forthcoming Commonwealth Games closet. Unfortunately when it comes to hockey the media doesn’t care. But for a beginning, the bad apples of Indian Hockey must be flushed out. Reforming the system can only happen after that.