India at London 2012: Indian hockey crying out for help

Battered, bruised, hurt and humiliated. Indian hockey is on a deathbed — our failure to win a single match in the round robin stage has plumetted our “unofficial”‘ national sport to a new low. A low even lower than our failure to qualify for the Beijing Games in 2008. For players and support staff part of the campaign, our London performance is likely to leave some permanent scars on their careers. Be it former players, ex-coaches or media or the fans, everyone has been in a state of disbelief about the way our team has fared in the competition. In fact, asked to comment on our team’s performance in London, former Indian captain Mohammad Shahid was at a loss of words to describe his feelings. He vented out his frustration by telling the media that the team didn’t even deserve to be in the Olympics.

In the coming days, given the public sentiment and political pressure, many heads are likely to be rolled out. Some seniors may retire, some support staff members asked to leave and some administrators forced to quit. But the question we need to ask is this — can all this stop the erosion in equity of hockey? The reality is, hockey might be a popular sport, after cricket, in terms of viewership but not even 1% of those viewers themselves play the sport. Contrast the same to Cricket, Football or even Basketball or Table Tennis and you will undestand where hockey lags behind.

Incidentally, I met one of the ex-Olympians (from another sport) today, who is now director of sport of an international school. He took me on the tour of the campus showing off the Olympic-size swimming pool, multi-purpose recreation hall, squash courts and a state-of-the-art gymnasium. He spoke about how the school takes great pride in sporting facilities and got my attention to the construction work going on at a far site, he said that will be the place where a hockey field will come up. I was impressed and told him that the school will be probably the first one in Delhi NCR to have an astro turf at its premises. Before I could add more, he cut in saying that the field will be a grass surface. He said that kids are more interested in playing sport like Basketball or, for the matter of fact, even horse riding in their school. The interest in hockey is on a wane and they don’t see any merit in investing a sum of more than a crore to lay a surface from which they cannot recover the cost.

The big picture story of Indian hockey is bleak. Our university hockey is still played on grass, forget about schools where chances are you won’t even find hockey sticks in the sports room. Even the sponsors who are putting money in hockey are drawing funds from their social responsibility reserves, not from marketing budgets because they see merit. In 2008, when India failed to qualify for the Olympics, critics had argued that “it cannot get worse than this (for Indian hockey)”. Sadly, it has got even worse…

By Aman Dhall