India finally had their first win in their last match in the World Cup hockey tournament held in Germany. Their 1st win yesterday in 7 matches enabled a 11th place(2nd worst ever in history) and a place in the the 2007 Champions Challenge tournament in Boom, Belgium, the qualifying tournament for the 2008 Champions Trophy. Normally I manage to somehow sit through our team’s matches but the display in this tournament was so pathetic that it wasn’t possible. Of whatever action I saw we seemed to make the same mistakes all over again in each successive match. The decision to start the tournament with Adrian D’ Souza as the no. 1 goalie was a big initial blunder that the team never could quite recover from. Adrian, coming back to the team after injury, was too slow rushing out of the box while defending penalty conversions. A far cry from the audacious young goalie who had blocked Sohail Abbas so many times in earlier tournaments. By the time Bharat Chetri, who did a great job in the recent tournaments, came in to replace him we already were out of reckoning for the top 6 positions.

Penalty corner conversions on the other hand were as expected a big problem after Sandeep Singh’s injury. Has our team even heard of grooming a backup for such a key player as the penalty corner specialist ? Every other team has at least 2 players in the line up that can score from PC’s. I suppose the performance of the young forwards were reasonable if one considered their lack of experience. Seniors like Gagan Ajit Singh were invisible despite having the experience of playing in the Dutch league. The defence was in total disarray for most of the matches and even Viren Risquinha had to play as a deep defender in the last match to stop the avalanche of goals conceeded.

The familiar post mortems in the press will appear soon and then things will continue in the same vein. The same Federation Chief KPS Gill who has held the post for past 2 1/2 decades will continue to rule his fiefdom in his autocratic, bizarre way. Today in an interview KPS Gill says that he had offerred to quit after Asia Cup 2003 but hockey lovers had forced him to continue. Now apparantly he’s determined to continue till the job is done. Yeah, right. An 11th position now in the WC after 25 yrs of doing the job. With no olympics medals or any podium finish at any major event all this while. Even god probably doesn’t know when this demented man wil say enough is enough.

As before I’m sure now the coach will be sacked and maybe some prominient senior players too. Well at least hopefully Gagan Ajit Singh should get a permenant axe this time. He sucked bigtime in all the matches failing to even trap passes in the D, leave alone score any goals that matter. A mere shadow of the brilliant forward that tormented the Dutch and German defences in the 2004 Champion’s Trophy. He’s been going steadily downhill ever since the team won itself a full time sponsor and he secured a contract to play in the dutch leagues. Gagan’s a good example that simply providing some financial incentives for players is not enough. What we need is some sort of long term investment in infrastructure, a change in the way our leagues are run and new initiatives to make the game popular. We also need to modernize our whole setup – maybe form new modern academies, seek guidance of foreign coaches, trainers and try evolve a system where juniors are given exposure to the latest modern hockey techniques. Of course most importantly we need a new Federation Chief -one that doesn’t interfere in the selection of players. The likelyhood of any such serious initiatives being taken in the near future is remote so we’ll just plod on downhill I guess And even though I enjoy seeking out obscure moments of glory in sports, things are now looking particularly bleak for Hockey. Heck, even the World Hockey Federation is now taking pity and wants to revive the game of hockey in our country. And we still shamelessly call hockey our national sport! We aren’t a great sporting nation by any means but it’s still an insult to all those sports where we actually do well like Shooting, Chess, Kabaddi, Badminton or even Cricket.