Sports: Cricket--Overplayed and Underprepared

The World Cup beckons, yet the players still wrestle with a system that refuses to make them winners.

He doesn't shrink when he says it. He doesn't blush, he doesn't cringe. Perhaps it doesn't hurt anymore to say it. So he grins, as if he's learnt to laugh at this joke some unforgiving God plays on him almost every day. "I'm a purser at Air-India, and at a recent course few people, if any, knew who I was. Yet when a Ranji Trophy cricketer, Samir Dighe, arrived, everyone collected around him." This story is being told by a young man, a hockey full back of distinction, who has played for India, at the Asian Games, the Olympic Games, and now is on his way to the World Cup in Holland. He is accomplished, he is also invisible. Anil Aldrin is his name.

How time flies, how ornaments -- and Indian hockey was one -- turn to dust. Back in 1932 when India arrived in Los Angeles for the Olympic Games, even their newspapers knew of India's hockey men. The morning the Indians were to dock, a headline read:

Hockey Kings Arrive Today
They Will Be Accompanied
By Their Many Wives
There are 2 Lions
In The Team

Today, as India prepares for the World Cup in Utrecht, Holland, no wives will accompany them, a few lions (Singhs) still remain, but the Kingdom has gone. The last time that India won a tournament where at least two of the big four -- Pakistan, Holland, Germany, Australia -- played was the Sultan Azlan Shah Trophy in 1985. Thirteen years ago. Aldrin knows why people don't recognise him.

Last week, at the Indian Hockey Federation (IHF) elections a sign of how twisted these times are emerged again. A few days earlier T. Jesudanam, an IHF vice-president and Andhra Hockey Association president, criticised ihf President K.P.S. Gill, telling India Today, "Indian hockey is run as one man's individual estate." Jesudanam even circulated a six-page letter highlighting the IHF's inefficiency: in the past four years, the senior Nationals had been held only once, accounts weren't finalised and player payments withheld. In Chandigarh, another IHF vice-president, Chander Shekhar, a Punjab Police IG, expressed his displeasure with Gill's cavalier style and asserted he would contest against Gill for the IHF presidentship. Except at the meeting something extraordinary occurred. Chander Shekhar nominated Gill for re-election as president and was himself immediately made senior vice-president, a new post; and Jesudanam stayed on as vice-president, now saying, "I wanted to say no, but my friends told me someone must fight from the inside."

Everywhere this pungent smell of decay oozes from Indian hockey. Gill, inheritor of a disintegrating game in 1994, papered over some of the cracks but when an entire edifice is crumbling, a tube of quickfix is somehow inadequate. Bringing the Champions Trophy to India for the first time, briefly reviving morale through the odd payment and housing players in superior hotels when foreign teams came calling, was but one step in a marathon race and the IHF seemed to tire fast. Forget the fact that the junior and sub-junior Nationals were sporadic -- just twice in four years; forget that, as Zafar Iqbal says, "they're still getting an aloo-gobi diet at sports hostels"; forget Pargat Singh's complaint that "the Junior World Cup team did not get even a cup of tea when they returned after reaching the finals". It's the senior team, in whose footsteps the young will want to walk, whose condition needs the closest scrutiny; if they have no stature, neither will the game.

As the election farce unfolded, the players burned under a chastising Patiala sun, with coach V. Bhaskaran almost pleading that "a high-altitude camp in Shimla or Ooty would be so much more useful". None exists. So practice over, they return to rooms where coolers wheeze and swarms of mosquitoes fly in formation, where no room has a carpet let alone a television set. "But they have attached bathrooms," says an official. One player smiles: "It's better than the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium in Delhi where the sheets are yellow and only officials stay in air-conditioned rooms." Later he adds, "I know so many juniors more talented than me who dropped out when they saw hockey's condition." Perhaps they knew that promises in Indian sport are spoken in some foreign language; they take too long to get translated into action. In 1994, Gill had promised an "IHF stadium with hot and cold running water, and independent rooms with cable television". The players still wait.

Bhaskaran, meanwhile, smoulders like the 555 State Express perched between his fingers. A coaches' panel to oversee the Indian game -- German coaches return from tournaments and immediately brief their counterparts -- was promised but remains a myth. Former captain M.M. Sommaya was appointed hockey manager for the Indo-Pakistan series to liaise tactically with the coach, but is now dispensed with. "Problem is," says Bhaskaran, "we don't even know the basics. Everyone in India, even goalkeepers, want to dribble and I'm still teaching hitting, trapping, man-to-man marking." Ask him about cameras to study players, about the Dutch coach who came similarly armed to Pakistan to watch India, and he snorts: "Camera? I don't even get cassettes, my wife has to record them for me."

He's not finished yet. "If you want me to do some homework then I have to quit my regular job.But then I will need to be paid as coach." Except he isn't. Neither are the players. And it is in this poverty, of ideas and bank balances, that hockey flounders. "Honorary jobs mean honorary results," says former Olympian R.S. Bhola. "We play for honour," smirks a player, "what else is there to play for?" Patriotism, they know, doesn't fill stomachs. In cricket, players get a Rs 1,800 daily allowance; in hockey it flickers between Rs 50 and Rs 100. For a single one-day match, a cricketer makes Rs 90,000; it is more than an Indian hockey player might have earned in the past four years. What makes them cringe in despair is that even soccer -- and India is not even in the world's top 100 teams -- has a national league, with enormous salaries for the players. Hockey has no league, no match fees, no player contracts. These are the reasons why Sommaya says that "we get players who are rejects from other systems".

Oddly enough, as India Today has learnt, the IHF has actually earned some money. Since 1996, it has received Rs 74 lakh from Doordarshan for telecast rights fees, Rs 21 lakh or so from Pepsi and Alan Pascoe International for the Indo-Pakistan series, Rs 2.5 lakh from Iodex, Rs 1.24 crore from Kuber for the Champions Trophy and Rs 28 lakh from Punjab and Sind Bank for the Nationals and the Junior World Cup. The amount given to players from all this was Rs 25,000 each for the Pakistan tour. What is as disturbing is the absence of proper accounts -- for instance, Rs 1.62 crore was spent on the Champions Trophy in 1996, yet there are no supporting vouchers to account for Rs 1.31 crore. Nevertheless, the entire accounts were passed without a murmur.

Solutions always exist, it is questionable whether enough men to implement them do. Gill has a second chance as the IHF president to pamper, spoil, restore honour to his team. Let him listen to his coach, who says, "Someone's got to market the players." Let him listen to the sponsors, hardly any of whom find his players worthy enough to endorse. "Hockey needs glamour, matches under lights, a little hype." But let him most of all listen to a young man from his team who as a child dreamed of an Indian shirt, and now as a man says, "I don't think I will let my son play hockey for India."

PENALTY CORNERS
POWER TO WIN

An abdominal guard, wrapped around him like a chastity belt. Padded foam shorts. A chest-and-arm guard resembling a traditional coat of armour. Pads which wrap round his legs, with padded kickers on his feet. Two gloves that seem like oversized mittens. A helmet with a throat guard. Jude Menezes isn't going to war, just preparing to stop penalty corners (PCs). No kidding. When the ball, travelling at 160 kmph, is fired at him from 14 yards, Menezes musn't move away. He must come in its way.

The PC, 1.5 seconds of slick technique and obscene power, personifies modern hockey. At the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, of the 173 goals scored, 66 were off PCs. The message: to convert is to win. Doesn't matter how many Menezes saves, India can't score enough. Like 5 of 52 versus Pakistan recently. Peer at India's recent important losses and it shows.

Olympics 1996: India stumble fatally in their opening match. They convert 0 of 5. Argentina converts 1 from 3 and wins 1-0.
Champions Trophy 1996: India needs to beat Pakistan. They convert 2 of 14 while Pakistan goes 2 of 9. India loses 2-3.
Junior World Cup final 1997: India converts 1 of 11, Australia 1 of 6. India loses 2-3.
Test vs Pakistan 1998: Indians convert 0 of 10, Pakistan goes 2 from 5. India loses 1-2.

Every match lost by a solitary goal. And an examination of the penalty corner process explains why.

STEP I: The Push.
The hitter awaits the ball at the top of the 16-yard circle. It must be quick, accurate. Says Pargat Singh: "We push too slowly." This means defenders exploding out of the goal can reach the hitter in time. Often the precision is absent. In a set-play measured in centimetres this can be fatal.

STEP II: The Direct strike.
The Hit: The first thing is speed. From push to strike to goal the best timing is 1.4 to 1.5 seconds. India often is not fluent enough.

The second thing is technique. Former Olympian R.S. Bhola says we don't have a high speed video camera (200 frames a second) to study the bio-mechanics of PC experts like Holland's Floris Bovelander. It would help explain Bovelander's stance, how his torso turns, the acceleration of his stick.

The third thing is accuracy. When the keeper lies down there are only a few inches on either side where the ball can pass. Bovelander would set up cones marking that area, hit 300 hits a day. At the pre-World Cup camp in Patiala, one player said, "We practise it for 30-40 minutes at most."

The fourth thing is power. Bovelander hit at 160 kmph. Pargat says he was 30-40 kmph slower. "I moulded myself on Bovelander. But you can't teach power." Or miraculously create muscle mass: Bovelander weighed 211 pounds, Pargat 160.

The Flick: The goalkeeper has two choices: either lie down for the hit or stand up for the flick (or scoop). Confusing him is vital. Bovelander did it perfectly. He would lift his stick and only in the downswing decide what to do and change his grip: hands spread apart for flick, hands together for the hit. No one in India has that technique. No one in India can flick at all for it requires enormous power. As a result opposing goalkeepers know the Indians will only hit.

STEP III: The Indirect Strike

Instead of hitting or flicking, the hitter may pass the ball to another player, leading on to a complex web of passes before the final hit at goal. "It needs timing and precision," says M.M. Sommaya "and we don't do it crisply." India has limited indirect options, most recorded on camera by European coaches. Yet we have no idea of their tactics; as Menezes says, "They keep changing their patterns."

No flicker, no power, no discipline, no technique, no scouting. And India still expects to win World Cups.