Bhai-bhai hockey

With a topic that’s bound to get everyone’s knickers in a twist, I willingly admit a different take on sports andonly because I am as far from the Shiv Sena as Pluto is from earth. 

When it comes to cricket, I always support the West Indies. If they lose, as they do these days, I shift to Sri Lanka. If they lose too, I root for Bangladesh. In fact, given the skulduggery now surrounding cricket — more than 10 years of watching cricketers run from genuine success to greater fame and even greater wealth; and then with more speed hurtling towards arrogance and even greed — I now support all nations playing cricket against India, including the Faroe Islands, Mauritania and Malta. 

With football, I am open. I will support Brazil through thick and thin, except if they ever play against India — and that allegiance too, given only if there’s at least one player from Goa in the team. If Brazil get knocked out, as they often do these days, I shift to any African country left in the tournament. When each of them loses, I stop following that tournament. 

With hockey, which is the subject of this essay, it’s a lot more complicated. 

I was 10, in Mombasa, Kenya, when I knew a grown man could cry over his team losing the final of a match. The year was 1960, and the place, Rome, and India, after winning gold at six successive Olympic Games, had just lost the medal to Pakistan by a solitary goal. With his ear stuck to the radio, my father wept. 

I was sad too, but only because I knew two of the players. When the Indian team went to Rome, they broke journey by ship in Mombasa to play practice games against Kenyan teams. The team’s stay in Mombasa was hosted by the Indian community, so two of the players, JV Peter and Erman Bastian, were given my bedroom. 

But by 1962, the Pakistani hockey team started visiting Kenya and playing matches, while the Indian team, for reasons best known to the administrators of that time, did not. As in Bombay in colonial times, Kenya had sports clubs that were community based. When it came to hockey, in Nairobi this meant the Sikh Union Sports Club, the Goan Institute, and the Sir Ali Bin Salim Sports Club. While there was a fierce rivalry between the clubs at the annual MR Souza Gold Cup, all the bloodied noses and swollen eyes were forgotten when it came to playing Pakistan. Everyone became Kenyan. In fact, till 1971, when Kenya played their first Black player under a Sikh captain and finished fourth in the World Cup (losing 1-2 to India) their hockey team was made up in equal measure of Sikhs, Goans and Pakistani and Indian Muslims. 

One can argue that between the ages of say 10-16, one is more focused on the sport being played than the country that played it. What I do know is that from 1962 onwards, I changed allegiance.

By the time the 1964 Olympics came around in Tokyo, I supported Pakistan. All it took was watching a tall centre-forward called Tariq Niazi who just tapped the ball from side to side as he cut through rival players as easily as a hot knife through butter.

In 1964, in spite of Tariq Niazi, India took back the gold, and I who wept with my ear to the radio. In 1968, I exulted with Pakistan on the podium while my father endured the ignominy of India finishing with the bronze. In 1971, Pakistan took the top spot at the World Cup, India finished third. 

Look at the facts too. Pakistan won the World Cup in hockey four times, more than any other team. India won it once, so long back no one remembers.

One moment alone captures the argument that Pakistani hockey can be magic. The World Cup finals in Mumbai’s Wankhede Stadium in 1982, when Pakistan beat West Germany 3-1 — and when India, incidentally, finished fifth, perhaps even sixth: 

The Germans opened the scoring and apart from their team bench and their small band of supporters waving their flag, the rest of the stadium echoed with murmurs of disbelief magnified many times over. Then, the magic: Hassan Sardar, another dashing Pakistani forward receiving the ball just inside the German half, then feinting, darting, and moving like water past four Germans even as the stands began to rise as one. He breezed past the goalkeeper’s flailing stick, and scooped the ball into the goal with a reverse flick as neat as you can wish for. A packed Wankhede Stadium was on its feet, the collective roar of approval fierce and palpable.
It is that collective euphoria I summon in these troubled times. 

Can it get any worse for both these nations of immaculate hockey pedigree? India just lost 0-4 to Belgium! In the same tournament, Pakistan lost to Ireland! Ireland, for God’s sake! India has had four European and Australian coaches in the last five years; and 21 in as many years! Pakistan, for all I know, changes its coaches every six months — when they do have a coach, that is. Hockey India is led by a capable administrator but like his cricket counterparts, a man who wants to do everything, including being coach.

In 1982, a young, silky smooth Pakistani team mauled India 7-1 at the National Stadium in Delhi. By the end of the match, Indian supporters were cheering them. It remains perhaps till date the best exhibition of the ‘Asian’ style of play that negates the largely hit and run methodologies favoured today. It was the game that won that day in New Delhi and we should accept that as graciously as those thousands who cheered for ‘our’ style of hockey to prevail. It is Pakistan that wears that mantle. 

We need a radical shift in our thinking. We should search for a good, no-nonsense Pakistani coach and bring him in with his own coaching staff. Hand him our immensely talented players and then see what happens to hockey on both sides of the border. 

Could we also use the game to enhance cordiality and trust between India and Pakistan? You tell me.

The author is a writer and theatre director currently working with Koothu-P-Pattarai, a Chennai-based theatre group