Whiz kids with sticks

Cricket may have the money and the means but hockey stirs up something inside all of us — deep down inside, perhaps — in the way cricket cannot. Remember the women of the Commonwealth Games?

Part of this is due to the weight of history: the prodigious, unparalleled talent of Dhyan Chand, the similarly unmatched feat of winning six Olympic golds in a row, the sheer domination of a game as rarely happens in truly global sports. Even the Brazilians have not dominated football as Indians have hockey. But its hold on us has a simpler reason: no one can play the game the way those on the subcontinent can. That would explain the adulatory television commentary during the India-Pakistan match.

The rest of the hockey world is gravitating towards a simpler, faster, more direct and clinical style of play, choosing function over flair. There is little romance, little showmanship in this percentage hockey. Happily, it’s not for us; the traditional form of the game is alive and sticking in South Asia.

But, and this is the sad part, barely so. Off the field, Indian hockey is a sad image of the game—limping along, disjointed, dispirited. There’s little money, to begin with, after the advertisers have paid the cricket stars. Too often, and too deeply, has it been affected by the regional — and personal — biases that have also played havoc in cricket. This has filtered down to the team as well, and there have been cases of players from one region refusing to pass the ball to players of another. K.P.S. Gill, the strongman of Indian hockey, has allowed things to drift when he is perhaps the person best equipped to steady the ship.

The good news is that things seem to be changing; the national team is getting more foreign exposure, and their recent training stint with the NSG commandos gave them the stamina to play as they did till the very end. Which leaves just one last problem: the crucial, historic cricket match has started.