Cricket’s poor cousin
– Road to tarmac, hockey gets short shrift
JAYDEEP BASU

New Delhi, July 23: Imagine this: the BCCI forgets to send a bus even as M.S. Dhoni and his boys are packed and ready for a foreign tour. When the players reach the airport late, the airline refuses to allow the team, Sachin Tendulkar and all, to board.

That’s what happened this morning, except that the forgotten, unlucky bunch was not the high-profile Team Dhoni but the Indian hockey team. The players were to catch the 6.30am flight from Pune to Delhi, and then leave on a four-nation Europe tour at 3am on Friday.

“It was a horror story,” said coach Harendra Singh. “SAI (Sports Authority of India) officials had promised to send two buses to our camp at 2.30am to take the team to the Pune airport, but the vehicles arrived two hours late.”

They were not buses, either. “What we finally found parked in front of our camp were two Matador vans.”

Still, the 22 players and the team officials somehow squeezed in with their luggage but were told at the airport they were too late.

“They had stopped issuing boarding passes. We requested the airline to let us board and send our luggage later,” Harendra said.

“But the deputy manager of the airline behaved very arrogantly. This sort of incident obviously affects the morale of the team as well as the image of the country.”

The team was put on another flight to Delhi after about eight hours, which forced the reconstituted national body, Hockey India, to postpone a tour-eve news conference where it was to unveil its logo.

Would an airline dare behave this way with the cricket team, an object of hero worship in a country where the airport frisking of a former President has sparked a furore?

A top private airline official said such a thing could not have happened with the cricket team anyway. She said the cricketers were always tele-checked in by the board in advance to avoid last-minute hassles.

The cricketers are unlikely to face such a problem even during private travel because almost all airlines offer them frequent-flier status. “Frequent fliers get the privilege of late check-in,” she said.

The hockey team leaves with just one goalkeeper. It lost Baljit Singh to a freak eye injury a few days ago, and second goalkeeper Sreejesh is yet to receive his visa. Officials said Sreejesh would join the team later.

So imagine this too if you can: Yusuf Pathan missing the ICC Twenty20 because of a visa delay.

Hockey India president A.K. Mattoo said he had ordered an inquiry into the flight fiasco and would take the matter up both with SAI and the airline. “You cannot take a national team for granted,” he said.

A SAI official here said: “We’ll look into the matter and talk to our people in Pune.”

Chief coach Jose Brasa dubbed SAI “a lazy organisation”, saying he was still waiting for training equipment he had asked for. “They are always late to send technical equipment. Technology seems to be progressing faster than SAI,” the Spaniard said.

Starting July 27, the Indians play 12 Tests in England, Belgium, Spain and the Netherlands.