Our hockey high

More than anything sports ministry, Indian Hockey Federation or even the afterglow of Chak De India have done to revive the game, the 2010 World Cup could signal a second innings in India.

Indian hockey team (Representational image) | Facebook

Let me begin by asking you a simple question. And if you cannot answer even this one, you can ask it at your work place, in your classroom, at your chai ka adda, wherever. The question is: which is the premier national hockey tournament in our country? For simplicity, what is the hockey equivalent of cricket’s Ranji or Duleep Trophy? If most of you, your colleagues and friends fail that test, I can offer a lifeline: name any major domestic hockey tournament played in India. It’s only when you flunk that test too that you will appreciate why an eighth place for India in the Hockey World Cup is not such bad news for India which ruled the game for nearly five decades.

You will also then understand why we need to celebrate not just our performance, but also the fact that this World Cup got played in India. Because, more than anything the sports ministry, the Indian Hockey Federation and even FIH, the hockey equivalent of ICC, have done to revive the game in India in the past two decades, more than even the heady afterglow of Chak De India, it is this World Cup that may signal the beginning of a second innings for hockey in India.

Of course, a higher finish by the home team would have helped. A podium finish would have in fact been brilliant. But, now that you have seen some of the most brilliant hockey played in these two weeks, in fact for most Indian adults below 40 perhaps their first experience of watching the game at its highest level, you can see why flukes do not get you shock victories in hockey. Those of my generation, when hockey was still played in schools, would remember the coach’s favourite adage: hockey by practice, cricket by chance. It is a dangerous thing to say in a country where people can kill for cricket, but a Miracle at Lord’s (Kapil Dev’s team, 1983) kind of thing is impossible in hockey.

There are many reasons why this is so, but the most important is that hockey, like football, is much more of a team game than cricket. Not one great Sachin-like innings, Imran-like bowling spell can close the match against the other side, even if it happens to be much better than you on paper. And, even if for a day, a great team switches off and lets a poor challenger win, the others will not let it go any further. In short, in hockey as in football, it is nearly impossible to defy form, in fact it is totally impossible to defy form over an entire tournament.

In fact, that’s why this is the third World Cup final in a row between Germany and Australia. But check out where the 12 contenders in this Cup were ranked in the world before coming to New Delhi, and then check out the rankings in this tournament. You might in fact find one very pleasant surprise: India, ranked 14, finishing now at eighth. Number eight in a World Cup played at home sounds awful, but not quite so when you see it as a nearly hundred per cent improvement over your world ranking.

In India as well as Pakistan, the biggest reason hockey has suffered so much is not because money discovered cricket and vice versa. It is because we looked at hockey with too much emotion. Once again, it may sound like a fantasy to anybody under 40 today, but until the late ’70s, even early ’80s, when the subcontinent still figured in the top four, it evoked a lot more raw, unfortunately even unsporting emotion in both countries. We did hockey disservice not because we gratuitously designated it our national game, but because we did so with the presumption that if it is to justify that title, it must keep winning us Olympic golds and World Cups. The moment we slipped from the top four, we lost interest. You can’t blame the sponsors and advertisers. They come much later in the picture even for cricket, in fact much after the advent of colour TV (after Asiad ’82) and then in the wake of the 1991 reform. (Where were Coke and Pepsi before then?) By that time we had cursed and abused our hockey into the ground. You did not see a single good news story on hockey in your paper, TV almost never covered any tournament live, schools banished the sport and even Punjab Police, BSF, the army (Sikh Regimental Centre, Meerut, Bengal Engineering Group and more), Indian Airlines who had nurtured hockey for decades lost interest.

And yet whenever we went out to play, we expected nothing but a podium finish, and when our hapless teams failed that test, we rubbished them for bringing dishonour to our national game. The Pakistanis did a little bit better, helped along by some foreign coaches, even winning a World Cup in these decades of decline (1994). But just that same emotional, irrational weight of expectation, combined with total neglect and failure to understand the strides the rest of the world was making, has now brought their hockey to the bottom of a World Cup rankings table. It may be some consolation that India had got there much earlier (England, 1986).

So-called experts and enthusiasts, including former hockey stars in both countries, have spent three decades now finding alibis for their falling rankings. They point at the usual suspects: white nations who have allegedly changed the entire pattern and system of the game to suit their own style. Now the subcontinent is brilliant at inventing conspiracy theories. But even by that standard this is totally, totally untenable and self-defeating. In fact this has generated self-pity and self-inflicted damage which has played a greater role in destroying our hockey than any shenanigans of our respective officials. This has psyched two generations of our players into believing that the new rules and the choice of an artificial surface were grand conspiracies to dethrone them and because they do not suit the Asian style, we stand no chance before the whites, particularly the hard-hitting Europeans. We forget, meanwhile, that under the same new rules, South Korea has risen as a world power ranked much higher than us, and China is getting there.

In fact it is Astroturf and the new rules that have made hockey such a wonderful game to watch, a fact to which several lakh people who came to watch the World Cup over two weeks would testify. Astroturf turned hockey into an all-weather game, so no rain breaks and, for the Europeans, no long winter breaks. It gives you true bounce, fast and consistent ball movement, both of which should help the Asian style of short-passing, ball-control hockey rather than hamper it. The changes in rules, abolition of off-side, sticks, turning and so on were carried out with the specific purpose of reducing referee whistles by more than a half, and with that it is now a much faster, enjoyable game, played by not just two countries in one neighbourhood but in a lot of the world, in fact in all continents. And then if you can get several thousand Delhiites to pay and watch it over a fortnight, or for Ten Sports to have such healthy ratings for its high quality live telecasts, even in a tournament where India finishes at eight, somebody must have done something right to bring back the beauty and joy of this great game. Of course, my argument would remain incomplete without acknowledging the foresight of Hero Honda which put so much money and emotion behind the game. SAIL and Sahara did their bit too, but if the Munjals of Hero see a future in hockey they must have spotted something there the rest of us didn’t. And who understands the market better than them? Check with Hero Honda’s competitors!