4th HIL starts: it’s time for players to prove their top billing

The long wait is over. The fourth Hockey India League unfolds today with the opener scheduled for the evening at Bhubneswar, the head quarters of Kalinga Lancers. They will take on Uttar Pradesh Warriors.

Top names in the world of hockey are here, despite being Olympic year. They all have got top billing almost USD 40k upwards. Now its time for them to deliver and entertain the fans, not get into watch and wait syndrome, where coaches turn cautious and make the matches boring. This attitude need to be sidelined, as only a match is played everyday and is telecast, all would want cracking games with lot of goals. Anything otherwise will kill the league.

Besides player costs, the assembly of world’s who is who, proves the contemporary worthiness of the Indian innovation, the Hockey India League.

HIL, now sponsored by a public sector giant Coal India, is on its second phase in the sense that teams assumed new combination. Second time ever the auction was held.

The title sponsor is worth Rs.14 Crore per year (about USD 2 million).

The marquee player concept has given way with the provision to retain some key players accorded to the Franchise owners.

The Second HIL auction was held with live telecast and webcast.

277 players including 140 plus foreign players came under the hammer.

Surprisingly, Belgium and Netherlands opted out.

It hardly had any effect as the world’s best from England, Germany, Australia and New Zealand made up their loss, and their leading players were in the bidding process.

India’s Akashdeep Singh, Sandeep Singh, Ramandeep Singh went for higher prices than Jamie Dwyer, Sardar Singh etc, giving clue as to how the franchise work.

By and large, unlike previous phase where goalies sold like hot cakes, now they were not sought after instead forwards and impact making midfielders like the likes of Moritz Furstes, Ashley Jacksons, Matt Gohdes’ etc.

So, the teams now have undergone many changes though label remain unchanged to ensure continuity.
Whether the new combination will prove to be better than previous one or otherwise will be the area of interest.

For example, top names in the Delhi Waveriders like Sardar Singh (India), goalie Nicolas Jacobi (Germany), Matt Gohdes (Australia) etc moved to Punjab Warriors. At the same time, the Punjab team that retained the coaching team, did not go for its mainstay Jamie Dwyer, who is now in the Uttar Pradesh ranks.
Such moves and shakes has given amble room for analysis, but it will take more than a month to find out the final answer.

Such things will keep hockey fans clued to television screens daily at 18.00 hrs IST from now on.

Another major change compared to Phase I is change of venues in the same city.

Chandigarh’s Sector 42 stadium will host Punjab matches while Delhi’s Shivaji stadium sports almost new look to host its new guest. National stadium located near India Gate, which has double capacity of Shivaj, but has access issues, will miss out.

The change of stadiums has been effected, it is learnt, to reduce costs and improve full stands.

The first of the 34 matches to be played till 21st February evokes interest. Both are, to start with have new coaches.

Some of the so-called innovations will come under scrutiny. Giving two goals for field goals, a provision to promote field goals, will be watched with interest. Many believe, a late field goal, which often happens with a long push deflected into the cage kind of stuff, has the capacity to alter the final outcome of the matches.

But the crux issue here is giving two goals to some variety of penalty strokes that is going to stoke the fires on the turf.

Whether such kind of classifying strokes whether it is because of deliberate or unintended, based on which double goals will be awarded, will have lot many human errors, and may cause confusion.