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Journalism of Courage
Darshan Gawkar had played out the scenario in his head, and in training, many times over.
In Bangalore, where he was with India’s junior and ‘A’ teams for the national camps, the 21-year-old attacker would run around 40m on the turf while balancing the ball on the stick after the daily sessions concluded. He’d carry the ball and lob it into the goal, and even try a few body feints to confuse the goalkeeper.
With this improvisation, Gawkar was taking one of the finest arts of modern hockey – the 3D skills – a notch higher.
And last week, during the bronze medal playoff of the National Games in Rajkot, all those hours of practising alone led to a moment of incredible audacity.
Maharashtra and Haryana were level at 2-2 after regulation time, forcing the match into a tie-breaker. After the shootouts got underway, Gawkar spotted that the Haryana goalkeeper wasn’t committing himself too much forward. He’d take a couple of steps and wait for the attacker, instead of closing him down. This gave him a chance to execute the trick he’d practiced a lot but never used in a match.
“If he would be coming forward, I’d have to look up while running. That could’ve taken my focus off the ball and affected the balance. Because he stayed in one place, I did not have to worry about his positioning and could concentrate on my run,” Gawkar, who plays for BPCL in domestic hockey, says.
When his turn came, Gawkar lifted the ball a little over knee height right from the start of his run-up and continued to march forward without letting it drop. After around 12 long strides – while bending forward and balancing the ball on the stick – he came within a couple of yards of the goalkeeper. Just then, Gawkar did a body fake and pretended that he was turning to the right to throw the goalkeeper off balance before lobbing it over his helpless opponent.
The ball bounced once before crossing the goal line as Gawkar, who was in the India ‘A’ camp for the Commonwealth Games but didn’t appear for the selection trials after his sister passed away, spread his arms wide open and launched into an aeroplane celebration.
It was more lacrosse than hockey.
A simple ‘lacrosse vs hockey’ Google search throws up a little more than 46 million results in less than a second. The two sports, although very different, seem similar. In lacrosse, the players swirl the ball in the net of its stick while running unlike in hockey, where most of the action takes place on the ground.
Instead of the net, it was the blade of Gawkar’s stick and for those few seconds when he ran with the ball, the rules blurred.
Hockey went 3D quite some time ago. As the good defending sides started bending lower and lower while defending – so much so that their fingers would get bruised by rubbing against the surface and the sticks would be kissing the turf to ensure the ball doesn’t go past – the attackers had to come up with new ways to beat them.
So, they began to lift the ball slightly. And to avoid going straight at the defender, which would make it dangerous play and hence a foul, the players started to dribble the ball in the air to change the direction of their run and go around the defender. The art of changing the direction of the ball mid-air creates an illusion of sorts, hence the name ‘3D’.
This skill also helps players to make space for themselves inside a crowded ‘D’.
Former Australia forward Jamie Dwyer is considered one of the best exponents of this. He learnt it by watching former Spain forward Santi Freixa use it. Among the current players, Argentina’s Agustin Mazzili is rated highly, and he inspired India’s SV Sunil to learn and perfect this skill. Sunil, at his peak, was considered one of the finest 3D dribbles.
Gawkar, who is the latest from Mumbai-based coach Merzban Patel’s endless production line, picked up the skill by watching all these players. But he wanted to give it his own spin. “I thought of doing something different. So, I started to run long distances by balancing the ball on the stick and beating the goalkeeper,” he says.
It’s a tactic that’ll be more lethal in shootouts than in the open play, where there’s a risk of being stopped for dangerous play if the ball goes above the knee height.
And the shootouts, over the years, have been rife with such audacious experiments. In 2019, for instance, South Korea’s most experienced player Lee Nam-yong stepped forward to take the decisive penalty in the final of the Sultan Azlan Shah Cup against India.
The 35-year-old began his run from the 23m line and continued to march straight towards Krishan Pathak after entering the ‘D’, giving an impression he’ll try to nutmeg the rookie goalkeeper. But as he reached the penalty spot, Lee casually lifted the ball with his stick and dinked it over Pathak, straight into the goal.
It was as spectacular as Gawkar’s goal. But it was the Indian’s ability to balance the ball on the stick right through that made it more audacious.
