Michael Nobbs, the dosa-loving hockey coach who made India one of the fitness teams, passes away

The genteel and affable Australian hockey great, who coached India from 2011 to 2013, passed away on Thursday after a prolonged illness aged 72.

A defender by trade, Nobbs was part of one of the strongest eras of Australian hockey, between 1979 and 1985. A lifelong admirer of the Indian style, the Perth native learnt the game from an Anglo-Indian player who left India during the Partition and settled in Australia. He liked to talk up his elimination skills — involving evading players and creating space — but often lamented not possessing the supple wrists and “rubber-band hips” of Indian hockey players; qualities the global hockey community admired, if sometimes grudgingly.

Nobbs was also renowned for his fitness, a hallmark he carried into Indian hockey when he took charge of a team in disarray in 2011. While he may not have been as sharp or meticulous a tactician as some of his contemporaries, he was hailed as an able man-manager — an underappreciated skill in the Indian context.

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Along with his close friend David John, the team’s physio, Nobbs transformed the physical conditioning of Indian players, not merely bringing them on par with the world but making them among the fittest. That, arguably, will be his most enduring legacy in Indian hockey.

He achieved this through methods that, at the time, seemed novel—almost alien—to Indian sport. Sardar Singh, who flourished under Nobbs, once recalled thinking it was a joke when he was first asked to drink black coffee before matches. This was a group accustomed to gulping down glasses of sugary tea before games and, on occasion, even at half-time.

Dietary habits underwent a significant shift as well. Rice and potatoes were phased out, replaced by protein-rich alternatives. There was initial resistance, but once players realised the tangible gains — an extra yard of pace, the satisfaction of seeing opponents gasping while trying to keep up — they bought into the philosophy. Today, many of those practices are embedded in the team’s culture.

Polite to a fault and always ready with a laugh, Nobbs displayed remarkable patience in his dealings with players. “You don’t achieve anything by being upset and yelling,” he would often say. “You have to find a way to do it — and preferably do it with a smile. The system here is very interesting. If you bring all the parts together, it can be a powerful machine.”

Michael Nobbs coached Indian hockey team from 2011 to 2013. (PHOTO: Hockey Australia)

But as he would later learn, decoding Indian hockey wasn’t that simple.

At the London Olympics, India slumped to their fourth consecutive defeat, going down 3–0 to a rapidly improving Belgium. After the match, Nobbs approached this correspondent, clearly upset. “Before you ask the reasons for the team doing badly,” he said, “ask your players why they refused to play.”

Revolt by players

At the time, the remark seemed cryptic. Its meaning became clearer later. During the Games, where India finished 12th out of 12 teams, the players had effectively staged a revolt. In their report to Hockey India, Nobbs and John noted that ‘a group of players (Punjab) were more focused on themselves than the team.’

Gifted defender Gurbaj Singh, along with former captain Rajpal Singh and Sarvanjit Singh, were identified as the key figures. Players were allegedly encouraged to feign injuries; some mocked teammates after defeats, while others resented the attention then captain Sardar received from the media.

For old-timers, these incidents in Indian hockey were par for course. Nobbs, by nature a cheerful coach with strong man-management skills, nevertheless found the atmosphere increasingly suffocating. Caught between government interference, Hockey India, and player unrest, the strain took a heavy toll. He slipped into depression, developed serious health issues, and eventually resigned, returning to Australia.

Six years ago, Nobbs was diagnosed with advanced stage lung cancer. Even when he was getting treated, Indian hockey was never far from his thoughts. Nobbs, who was a consultant for the movie Gold, would joke that it was ‘fun to watch the chaos from the outside’.

When he overcame it the first time, he described the experience as “winning the lotto and having Christmas at the same time.”

Through all of it, the memories he carried from India were rarely about results or medals. They were of Bengaluru mornings at a darshini, tearing into a crisp ghee roast and trying — patiently, good-humouredly — to understand a game and a system that refused to be simple.