After the Men’s Asia Cup telecast by DD Sports, there is no other tournament on the anvil for broadcast. If India gets Champions Trophy or participate in any other tournament, we will get you the schedule.

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Content Manager

Earlier article on Telecast

New Delhi: August 22/2005Hockey is second most popular sports in India, being played round the year and across all the provinces. Therefore, there exists a vast scope to tap the potential from the point of view of spectators. Very unfortunately, the Indian Hockey Federation, easily the worst managed of national associations in the hockey world, does hardly organise any international tournament in India to cater to the need. In all just three test matches were staged in India by the IHF in the three years’ interregnum between 2000 and 2003, to quote an instance.

Thankfully, however, coming up of dedicated sports channels came as a boon for the hockey fans. Till then, the national telecaster Doordarsan strove hard lonely to provide hockey feeds, especially those featured in the grand multi-sports events like Olympics, Asian Games etc.

Taj Television Co. brought home the 2002 Cologne Champions Trophy and with that started the live telecast bonanza. The telecasts could have changed the hockey scenario nt he country, from most invisible to widely witnessed sport.

But alas the IHF did not allow that to happen. Ad hoc policies, such as one recently taken not to field juniors (no matter even if had already played the Olympics in the past) in the senior tournament presented hockey in a poor light.

See the statistics here.

India loses 34 of the 53 matches telecast live in India in the last 20 months alone. That is from January 2004 to August 2005, at the end of Mini World Cup.

It started this way. India drew a blank in 2004 Janauary when the IHF ignored all the Senior players who were training in a camp in Delhi and sent a B team. To pretend it’s a senior team, two or three of them were also taken. Result: India finsished last , won no matches, just drew one while lost all other five matches.

Next outing, a 3-match Test Series against visiting Netherlands too failed to bring a win for India.

Three wins came in the Madrid Olympics Qualifier out of 7 matches, and that was the first occasion in three events that have been telecast live in India when the Indian team won some matches.

Rabobank 4-Nation after that was a wash out, just two matches won out of seven int eh Olympics, same number of wins in 8 Tests against the Pakistan after that.

After that four events were telecast live by various television channels, mainly ESPN-STAR Sports and Ten Sports. India won just a match each in all these engagements, even those lone win coming after India went out of medal contention or the series was lost.

2005 too proved frustrating. New Coach. New Team. Same old story. In 2005, of the 10 matches telecast live, India won just two matches.

Unless the target tournaments are fixed and the IHF stops interfering with the team selection, whatever the television efforts, hockey will go for a six. That much is for sure.