Rajinder Singh shares a video of his mentor Sardar Singh, he’s been obsessively watching for the last decade or so. Of a skill so mind-blowing that if, say, a Messi performed it, that would be trending all over, be the news peg of countless hagiographies and turn the victims into memes.
But hockey isn’t football and Sardar Singh isn’t Messi.
And so, the six-second clip from India’s match against the Netherlands, which the rest of the hockey world including Sardar himself must have forgotten, lives on in the phone — and heart — of a young Sirsa boy.
“He beats a couple of onrushing players while receiving the ball,” Rajinder narrates what he sees. “Then, look how in the same motion he dodges the ball at high speed and taps it through another player to drive forward.”
Rajinder shares a video of his mentor Sardar, he’s been obsessively watching for the last decade or so. Of a skill so mind-blowing that if, say, a Messi performed it, that would be trending all over. pic.twitter.com/3yAVM5hCrg
— Express Sports (@IExpressSports) October 19, 2024
There’s more that connects the prodigious 21-year-old Rajinder and one of hockey’s modern-day greats. Siddharth Pandey, the general manager and team director of Hockey India League franchise Hyderabad Toofans, makes a bold declaration. “Rajinder is Sardar’s clone,” says Pandey, whose team signed the midfielder.
The coincidences are plenty. Both Rajinder and Sardar are from the same village — Sant Nagar in Haryana’s Sirsa. Pandey takes over: “He is a Namdhari, just like Sardar is. Great on the ball, just like Sardar was. Physically really strong, built like a tank. Really low body fat percentage. He can run all day. He can eliminate players with individual actions. He can drive forward with the ball.”
Even the man himself has no doubt. “He is a complete player,” says Sardar, without hesitation. “We see sometimes that there are players who have speed and skill but height… or one element is missing. Rajinder is a complete package.”
Then, he throws in a word of caution saying, “Chalo, he is only 21 years old. Potentially, he can be a very good player who can serve the national team for the next 8-10 years.”
***
Rajinder’s career-defining week — being picked in the HIL and knocking on the doors of the national team — started with a mistake.
When he was submitting his entry for the Hockey India League (HIL) auctions, Rajinder erroneously chose Rs 2 lakh as the base price instead of Rs 5 lakh. “I wrote them an email but it was too late by then,” he says.
By the time the players with a base price of Rs 5 lakh were picked, Rajinder — who was at the national camp in Bengaluru — feared he’d go unpicked. “I was checking the composition of other teams, just to see how many slots were open for midfielders. Moreover, there were so many players in the 2 lakh bracket that I was concerned that my name would come too late.”
His friends and family started calling him. So, Rajinder switched off his phone. He looked at it again directly in the evening, while working out in the gym.
Rajinder’s career-defining week — being picked in the HIL and knocking on the doors of the national team — started with a mistake.
“Then, my name came up. And the bidding began — started with 2 lakh, increased to 5, 8, 10 lakh… I was with Vishnu (Vishnukant Singh, another young India international) and he too got excited,” Rajinder says.
It was one of those typical auction moments.
Until that moment, Rajinder was Indian hockey’s best-kept secret. A playmaker who flew under the radar despite being in the junior squad for the last three years and even playing in the 2023 Under-21 World Cup.
In the tightly-knit hockey circles, however, they whispered about Rajinder’s meteoric rise, especially in the last 10-12 months. When the time came, there was a scramble to sign him.
By the time the bidding war ended, Rajinder had commanded a sum more than 10 times his base price. The Rs 23 lakh Hyderabad spent on him might be loose change compared to what prodigious talents earn in the Indian Premier League. It might not even be a life-changing amount for the son of a land-owning farmer, whose two siblings live in Australia and Canada. But it was a bid that reaffirmed his rising status.
“You can build a team around him in the years to come,” says Pandey, also a pundit who is dubbed as the voice of Indian hockey. “At 21, he is at that level where Sardar was (at that age).”
When Hyderabad celebrated Rajinder’s signing as if they’d scored a goal, Sardar, the mentor of the Soorma Hockey Club, sat across the table with some regret. The quirks of player auctions meant the former India captain couldn’t go for him.
Without Sardar, however, Rajinder might not have even been here.
***
Sardar influenced Rajinder’s hockey dreams much before he even picked up a hockey stick and in ways he didn’t even know.
Before the former world player of the year mentored his prodigy, Sardar laid the foundations by developing a ground where young players from Sirsa would learn the craft.
”In 2010, after we won the bronze medals at the Commonwealth and Asian Games, the Hooda government gave us prize money of Rs 52 lakh,” Sardar says. “I utilised a lot of that amount to develop the ground in our village and restarted the academy there.”
Around four years later, Rajinder joined the Namdhari Academy, where Sardar too had begun his journey. He did so only because he was lured by the prospect of getting a brand-new hockey stick and a ball.
“But on the first day, Gurmej coach Saab, who also trained Sardar paaji, just made me run laps of the ground,” Rajinder says. “One lap, two, three… It continued like this for 3-4 days. Maine socha hockey toh de nahi rahe yeh… so I stopped going.”
One evening, Gurmej — who lived closeby to Rajinder and also coached Sardar — stopped over on his way back to check on his newest recruit.
Sardar influenced Rajinder’s hockey dreams much before he even picked up a hockey stick and in ways he didn’t even know.
“He asked why I stopped coming to the ground and I replied curtly, ‘Because you aren’t giving me a stick’,” Rajinder laughs. “I got one the next day and I haven’t stopped playing since.” Two months later, Rajinder had his first brush with his hero.
Sardar, during a visit home, went to the ground to distribute playing kits to the best performers. Rajinder wasn’t on that list. “But meeting him, listening to his words stoked my interest.”
His father tended to the family’s farm and his siblings flew abroad. Rajinder, however, chose to emulate his newfound hero and picked a career in hockey.
***
At first, he played ‘everywhere’.
One day, he’d be a defender. But that meant being on the bench because there was a ‘better player in that position’ in the Namdhari team. Another time, he was played as a striker.
And then, his coach at Namdhari, Harwinder Singh, slotted him in the centre of the midfield; a critical position from where a player can dictate the pace, flow and direction of the game.
Sardar, around this time, was at his peak and played at a level that he could walk into the playing 11 of any team in the world. Rajinder, the impressionable teenager, would binge on his videos; more so because he had begun playing in the same position as Sardar.
Watching Sardar, he learnt how to receive the ball under pressure. “I began simulating such situations by asking three players to charge at me when receiving the ball. Under pressure, you have to decide the next move after stopping — whether to pass the ball or dodge the players.”
Over the years, he started bookmarking clips of another player — Kevin de Bruyne. The young Indian would watch and learn how the Belgium and Manchester City footballer telegraphed passes to his teammates.
“In hockey, we play overhead passes quite frequently now. And De Bruyne places them perfectly — they are so well calculated, the defenders can’t get there but it still gets close to the strikers!”
He’d then try to replicate that on the ground. “I imagine the areas on the field where strikers can be fed balls during a game. So, I place the practice cones there and play passes in that direction. At the academy, I would have 100 or so repetitions daily,” Rajinder says.
Rajinder continued making incremental progress in his formative years. It picked pace during the pandemic. And Sardar, who else, had an outsized role.
Rajinder flew under the radar despite being in the junior squad for the last three years and even playing in the 2023 Under-21 World Cup.
As the rest of the world retreated indoors and socially distanced themselves, Rajinder’s relationship with his idol got closer than ever. Sardar — who returned to his village — would take lessons nearly every evening, passing on all the knowledge he’d acquired during his illustrious career.
And Rajinder lapped it all up. “Everything — receiving the ball, one-on-one dodges… He broke down complex hockey moves, like using the gap between the legs of an opponent to play a pass, or the backhand… Paaji’s backhand was perfect; he taught me how to position the lower body, what part of the stick should connect with the ball… I grew a lot during those years!”
On the other side of the pandemic, Rajinder emerged as a player ready to wear the India shirt. He got picked for the junior side but it wasn’t until recently that he stormed into the consciousness of the national team coaches.
Of all places, Pandey noticed Rajinder’s potential, in Bangladesh this year in March and April, when he was playing in the country’s national league for Mariners Hockey Club.
”He was playing against the club I coached, Abahani,” says Pandey, “and he single-handedly dictated the game. We kept in touch after Bangladesh and I tracked him since then. He has grown by leaps and bounds. The reports coming out of the national camp point out that consistently, he is one of the best performers on the pitch.”
Rajinder is on the selectors’ radar and the watchlist of the coaches. On Friday, he appeared for the selection trials for next week’s test series against Germany. The outcome isn’t known yet. But one thing was certain: before stepping on the field, he watched for inspiration the same Sardar Singh video he’d been watching for the last decade.