A question of tactics for India in Hockey World Cup

One Olympics (1960) as a player, four others (1968, ’80, ’84, ’92) as a coach. Yet, Balkishen Singh is an enigma in India, not the messiah that he should have been. And that’s because Indian hockey saw in him an infidel who spoke the language of the Europeans and about the game they played – ‘total hockey’.

Ever since Johan Cruyff popularised the concept of total football and the Dutch hockey gurus at Ajax borrowed it with glee, total hockey was the mantra that had the Europeans in thrall.

Around the same time, celebrated German coach Horst Wein institutionalised it, calling for versatile players, rapid interchange of positions, short, well-planned attacks and flowing movement which was guaranteed only by ball possession and crisp passing.

That’s pretty much what we see around the world today. But what did Balkishen introduce to the world that he became a celebrated theoretician?

Balkishen highlighted the fundamentals of possessional play with a technique that borrowed as heavily from soccer as it did from the rules of geometry. Using the backpass as the essence, he formed his three principles of attack: width, depth and speed (penetration). The three-dimensional precept meant that two players had to be on either side of the ball and a player behind to inject speed into the attack.

Balkishen also devised the two centre-haves formula to strengthen his concept. In 1984, it was Hardeep Singh and Joaquim Carvalho and in 1992 it was Jude Felix and Sukhjit Singh, with one being a schemer and the other assisting the defence and marking the centre forward of the other team. These theories were in direct conflict with the 5-3-2 format, India’s penchant for positional play and the players’ propensity to wait for the ball to come to them. As in the past, fitness was an issue as was the will to change. “The ball moves faster on the synthetic pitch. You have to be on the move all the time. You cannot get stuck in a position and wait for everything to happen,” Balkishen used to say.

One man who heard the gospel was Kim Sang Ryul, the father of the South Korean hockey revolution. A disciple of Balkishen at the Sports Authority of India, Patiala, where the Korean did his diploma course, Kim used the inverted triangle extensively in the 90s. In fact, Korea’s runaway success until the Sydney 2000 Olympics can be attributed to Balkishen.

At the same time, Balkishen was considered a jinx in India. His worst moment came in 1992 when the team discarded his ideas at the Barcelona Olympics and sank into the familiar quagmire of traditional hockey to finish a lowly seventh. Fitness was a problem but, more importantly, it was time for the players to go back to old habits as that was what they had been taught from childhood.

At one point of time in 1992, Balkishen and PA Raphael were the national coaches for the senior and junior teams, following much the same ideas. More foresight could have seen both work together to prepare teams ready to play the game the modern way.

Another man who could have achieved tremendous success was Cedric D’Souza. His 1994 World Cup debut was a dream, as it were, with India finishing fifth. The ideas were similar – a tight defence and economy of movement as the players systematically switched from defence to attack, continuous off-the-ball running and intricate setpiece drills – the anti-thesis of the traditional format. Then again, he met with failure in the subsequent tournaments as he didn’t have a captain who subscribed to his ideas and met with resistance from a majority of the players who couldn’t grasp his ideas, let alone deliver.

In the subsequent years, Germany’s Gerhard Rach and a whole lot of Indian coaches – V Baskaran, Joaquim Carvalho, Harendra Singh and Rajinder Singh – all experimented with European concepts. But the basic premise had changed: it was instinctive hockey with a bit of Euro techniques.

Now it is the turn of Spaniard Jose Brasa to shift the focus towards Europe again. Whether he has the players with the right fitness levels, sound basics and technical maturity to understand his ideas will be evident once the World Cup unfolds. As history tells us, total hockey or its advocates have never been at fault despite India’s failure on the field. It’s just that the coaches have failed to get the response they needed.