The other men in blue

A win at the Asian Games after sixteen long years gave India an automatic berth at next year’s Rio Olympics. Despite that, the team kept its foot pressed on the pedal. There were a few rough moves, but sometimes you can feel the team trying just a bit too hard. After all, it plays with a heavy burden of the past. Our hockey team is the most successful hockey team in Olympics history with eight golds, one silver and two bronze. It is also the sport that has brought us all our gold medals barring the one Abhinav Bindra got in the 2008 Olympics.

Some of us, for precisely this reason have an emotional connect with hockey. Call it nostalgia, or a bias for an underdog that in recent times has gone through more downs than ups. It is a team that plays for a country of a billion people, but without their expectations. Not very encouraging for sportsmen who thrive on public adulation, yet the team continues to fight against the many odds. The two year long power tussle between Hockey India and Indian Hockey Federation to claim ownership of Indian hockey took a toll. International Hockey Federation had to step in and take away the rights for India to host the Champions trophy. The team suffered but as it happens in Indian sports, the politics played on.

Yet, there have been moments of glory. India won the 2011 Asian Champions trophy. The reward, an embarrassing Rupees 25,000 per team member, which the players refused to accept. Compare this with what is on offer at the IPL and it makes you wonder. With such incentives or the lack of them, why anyone would play hockey anymore? It can only be for the love of the game. In 2013, India nearly missed playing the Azlan Shah, a premier tournament in the hockey calendar, because the Sports Authority of India, a government body refused to pay for the team’s airfare.

Then there have been the fiascos with coaches. Ric Charlesworth is to hockey what Sachin Tendulkar is to cricket. It took him just ten months to quit in disgust and frustration as the technical director of Indian hockey. He admitted that the talent pool in India was amazing, but the bureaucracy was a different ball game. We all know what that means, our sporting fiefdoms are as legendary as Charlesworth himself. The reaction by the Indian hockey chief Narendra Batra to the resignation, the former Australian great needs mental and psychological help! Only someone truly passionate and brave will venture into dens like these. The coach who helped India qualify for the next Olympics Terry Walsh, has also left, blaming not surprisingly, our sporting bureaucracy for his decision. At this rate, its just a matter of time before the next one falls.

I grew up hearing stories of Sansarpur, a village on the outskirts of my hometown Jalandhar. For years it was called the mecca of Indian hockey. As many as fourteen national hockey players belong to this small village. Not just that, seven have competed in a single Olympics, the 1968 games in Mexico. Now it seems to have fallen off the sports map. Lack of facilities and financial support has forced families to become practical. They realise, it is better for their children to study and go abroad than to pick up the stick and dribble, an art that has been as much a part of Indian hockey as tiki taka is to Spanish football. But, barring one, most of the turfs in the country are considered unsafe for training and we question why we are not adapting to the fast and furious pace of European hockey.

I was in the stadium for the India vs Pakistan match at the Delhi Commonwealth games. The enthusiasm for the game, the welcome cheer the players got once they entered the arena resounded just as loudly as it does at a cricket match. Yet the story ending is always different.

How many of us have walked pass Sardar Singh and not recognised him or known that penalty corner specialist Sandeep Singh was once accidentally hit by a bullet and almost paralysed for two years. Chak De India, the film starring Shah Rukh Khan as a hockey coach training a motley bunch of girls to glory has been the only influence Indian hockey in recent times has had on the outside world. Most believe the actor’s role was based on Mir Ranjan Negi, a former player. For others, it is a life of anonymity. Far removed from the world of cricket where even someone with match fixing charges against him like Azharuddin, now has a movie being made on him.

So, while our cricketers who take the bulk of sponsporship budget, now look a jaded lot after the “Bangla bashing’ and themselves need the ‘Complan’ or ‘Bournvita’ they gleefully tell us to eat on our television screens, this bunch that has hardly advertised a toothpaste collectively, goes out playing with their hearts on their sleeves. It may take a bit longer, but I haven’t given up hope, even if our next match is against Australia. That is the least they deserve.