HOW does one future proof Indian hockey? A truly Sisyphian task. For as long as rent seekers dominate Indian hockey, the players on the field will continue to suffer. India finished ninth in the recently concluded Junior World Cup hockey tourney defeating Poland 4-0. So, what are we talking about? Is there any tangible improvement in Indian hockey? More importantly, can there be any improvement in the near future? We have Suresh Kalmadi and Co on one side and JB Roy and Amrit Bose on the other side of this deeply divided vector. Does anyone care that the Indian junior hockey team was beaten black and blue? No, I doubt very much. It is a travesty.
FIH boss Leonardo Negre is busy playing cat and mouse with all the factions that want to control Indian hockey, or what is left of it. India plays host to the hockey World Cup next year, then hockey is a discipline in the Commonwealth Games, followed by the Asian Games at Guangzhou. Three big events where India should attempt to pick itself up from the bootstraps. But can it? Not if the officials have any role to play. From the dark days of Raghunandan Prasad as president of IHF to the darker days of the KPS Gill dispensation which finally culminated in the shame and infamy of the ill fated Jyothikumaran sting episode, Indian hockey has wallowed in mediocrity for ever so long. From Willesden to the Olympic qualifier in Chile, India has seen a slide, no, plumbed the depths.
Hockey bosses have come and gone. Most have been control freaks. Which brings me to the core of the problem. Associations are the very bane of Indian sport, for this is where the dangerous head of regionalism and factionalism rears its head. And this is an all pervasive phenomenon. It cuts across all theatres of Indian sport. Remember when Sunny Gavaskar plumped for Ghulam Parkar and Suru Nayak in the Indian side. Is there no nationalism left in Indian hockey? Why is regionalism so dominant? Remember the BCCI awarding managerships of the Indian team to people like Chamundeshwarnath. And that is one of many examples. I am only repeating it because of its immediacy. Associations are required by those who contest elections. Associations mean votes. So, they are given largesse in terms of allotment of matches, plum positions on foreign tours et al. The pot is kept on the boil.
Do the small hearted functionaries who dominate Indian hockey care about the game they manage? Chak De should have been a game changer. It should have energised and adrenalised Indian hockey. It showed the small hearts and smaller minds of Indian hockey satraps in all their many splendoured glory. It was a shocking denouement, but it portrayed the truth. Only real life is even more complex and complicated. So, while Indian juniors and seniors struggle on the playing fields, this massive charade of Hockey India and what have you unveils itself daily on the sports pages.
I thought sports minister MS Gill who showed much intent and initiative would intervene in this traveling circus and restore some semblance of order at the top. But the ad hoc body has given way to a new management team where very few individuals are remotely connected to hockey. Unfortunately Gill has shown no overt or covert move till date on the state of Indian hockey which is very close to tatters. Performing fleas have taken over the game. At the end of the day performance is the only thing that matters. And performance on the playing fields is what sport is all about. Indian hockey cannot be revitalised by this lot, whichever faction is at the helm. One will have to put building blocks in place. And it will have to be done from ground zero. It has to be backed by seriousness. Years ago, I remember asking Raghunandan Prasad about a particular player selected for the Indian team. The meeting took place at the then BHA and guess what? Prasad didn’t have an idea who I was talking about. The IHF president did not know about a player who was selected to play for India. I was branded a trouble maker and all further questions asked by me were not answered. I wrote a damning report in The Illustrated Weekly where I was working. But Prasad and others of his ilk have thick hides. They don’t care.
Prasad was managing director of Indian Airlines, his primary job was to run the airline. Not quibble over semantics with me on Indian hockey. And that is the tragic story of Indian hockey. Life goes on. People come and ago. Indian hockey touches new nadirs and faces ignominous defeats. Now Negre has foisted Brassa as the chief coach of Indian hockey. Incidentally Brassa used to coach the Spanish women’s hockey side. Negre in turn has given India a deadline to merge its hockey bodies, or he will snatch the World Cup from India. Is there any connection in these pressure tactics? On the one hand use a cosh to threaten India to create a unified hockey body which is replete with deep fissures and as a quid pro quo get his countryman on board to take the reins of Indian hockey. Will this latest experiment with truth work? I doubt very much.
Interestingly, it is not just Indian hockey which is suffering. Wallowing in a trough of mediocrity, our neighbour Pakistan too is unable to come to terms with the nuances of contemporary hockey. Fast and bruising suited to European stylistics, the game has undergone a massive overhaul in terms of the rulebook. Most new rules support the European style of play. And this is the greatest subterfuge perpetrated on the sub continental style of hockey. Take the skill out the game. The skill that Indians and Pakistanis displayed with great acumen and adroitness. How many Sikhs do you see playing for India? What happened to the nurseries that threw up hockey stars? Is FIH or IHF unified or divided studying this phenomenon? Why has hockey dropped off the radar? Why have the wheels come of the bus? Who is playing hockey, which are the areas of influence and talent? If the Sikhs aren’t playing with the same vigour, if the Advasis are not playing, if the Christians from Mumbai or the tall, strong lads from Coorg aren’t playing, then where the hell is the gene pool? A contracting gene pool is only one of the problems. The bigger problem is systemic. A system which rewards mediocrity, a system which clings on to power, a system which doesn’t move even after it is prodded. A system where inertia and lassitude prevail.
So, who will Brassa and Harendra talent spot and coach if hockey is no longer an obsession amongst the young? I remember around the time Leander Paes was thrown up by the Britannia Amritraj Tennis Academy, there were a whole lot of different sportspersons’ children playing tennis. Leander’s father Vece played hockey for India, Gaurav Natekar’s father Nandu played badminton, S Venkataraghavan’s son also turned to tennis, as did Ashok and Nirupama Mankad’s sons Mihir and Harsh. Michael Ferreira’s son Mark also turned tennis player. The only exception was Flying Sikh Milkha Singh’s son Jeev who became a professional golfer. This was a paradigm shift which only threw into stark relief the fact that all these sportsmen and women realised that tennis was a sport where one could make big bucks. The reality is that only Leander and Jeev Milkha Singh have made the cut from that lot. But at least two have. Hockey needs a sustained push, it needs something that gives it a breakthrough benefit.
That can only come from a major victory. A victory like India achieved in the 1983 cricket World Cup or Pakistan’s T20 World Cup victory. But that is mission impossible. First clean the stables and then get the players ready for battle. A wider dispersal of cricket took place in India only because the message of cricket spread far and wide. Television helped. Hockey is floundering. It needs a kick in the seat of its pants.
