BackOlympics: No going back in time for Indian Hockey
India's great legacy in hockey is a bit like Brazil's in football. How will it affect the team in Rio?
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Everywhere has its irrevocable national catastrophe, something like a Hiroshima," wrote Nelson Rodrigues, perhaps Brazil’s greatest playwright. “Our catastrophe, our Hiroshima, was the defeat by Uruguay in 1950."
He didn’t live to watch the “Nagasaki"—Germany’s 7-1 evisceration of the Seleção in the 2014 Fifa World Cup semi-final, in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Two years after Rodrigues’ death, on a July evening in 1982—a date that neatly bifurcates the heartbreak of the Maracanã and the Belo Horizonte humiliation—“football died" as a magical Brazilian side lost 2-3 to Italy to exit the World Cup. It’s perhaps fitting that the Estadi de Sarrià in Barcelona, where the match was played, no longer exists.
Rodrigues’ hyperbole gives some idea of what football means to the Brazilian nation and of the burden that the current generation of players must shoulder as custodians of a matchless past. In the run-up to the 2014 World Cup, the first Brazil had hosted since 1950, ESPN produced a documentary titled Barbosa: The Man Who Made Brazil Cry, about the goalkeeper who let in the goal that gave Uruguay victory in 1950. It starts with the line: “Moacyr Barbosa allowed a goal and with that, fell from heaven to hell."
Indian hockey’s descent into the abyss started in the 1970s. An eighth Olympic gold in Moscow (1980) shouldn’t have fooled anyone, with Spain the only decent opposition in the fray after the US-led boycott of the Games. At the previous Olympics, in Montreal, India had gone without a medal for the first time. Some say that they were unlucky not to make the semis, losing on penalty strokes to Australia in a replay. But that would ignore that Australia had thrashed them 6-1 earlier in the group stage. It was perhaps no coincidence that this was the first Olympic tournament to be played on an artificial surface.
In 1978, while defending their World Cup crown, India were thumped 7-0 by West Germany and failed to make the last four. On home soil in 1982, things were marginally better, but narrow defeats to the Netherlands and Australia meant another medal missed, even as Pakistan traipsed off with the gold.
The nadir was reached a few months later in New Delhi. Brazil have won two more world cups since the day the game died in 1982. For Indian hockey, there have been no such consolations. India’s opponents that evening, in the 1982 Asian Games final, were Pakistan. With Hassan Sardar dropping deep and orchestrating the play from behind the other forwards, India were tactically clueless and shredded 7-1.
“Playing Pakistan is always a pressure situation," Mir Ranjan Negi, the much pilloried goalkeeper, told Sportstar years later. “In the final of the 1982 Asian Games, the pressure was too much for us to handle. The hype over the India-Pakistan final affected us. Mohammed Shahid was my roommate, we could not get proper sleep two nights before the big game. Match tickets were being sold at a premium; many could not get tickets and were forced to watch the final on Doordarshan, which, for the first time, was telecasting a major sports event live."
Negi, whose subsequent travails and reinvention as a successful coach formed the basis for Shah Rukh Khan’s role in Chak De! India, was so affected by the game that he came up with the most bizarre theory to explain away the loss—attributing it to a Pakistani hypnotist named Iqbal.
In his book From Gloom To Glory, he writes: “Looking back at the video recordings of the 1982 Asiad final, I just cannot believe what I see. I wonder whether it was really me in the Indian goal. Many people believe in hypnotism. This hypnotism angle can absolve me from all responsibility. It is an important mystery which needs to be resolved."
That the result was no fluke would be borne out in the years that followed. Pakistan went on to win Olympic and world cup gold, while India haven’t even had a semi-final to savour in the two events that matter most since 1980. The silver at the 2016 FIH Champions Trophy was the first medal in a marquee event since the bronze-medal finish in the same tournament 34 years earlier.
These days, things are no better across the border. Pakistani hockey, once the envy of the world, is now firmly frozen in its winter of discontent, having failed to qualify for the Olympics for the first time. “It is so sad to see the team, with such a glorious past, struggling now," Sardar told Dawn in 2012. “I know Pakistanis are still interested in the sport. Our stadiums are empty just because they are so disheartened by our current state that they don’t want to get too involved in the game and end up heartbroken in the end."
Glorious past. Heartbreak. Sporting legacies are wonderful things, capable of uniting fans from wildly disparate backgrounds. But for players and coaching staff, they can be millstones. “I could spend a whole day learning about Liverpool’s history, but the truth is that I just don’t have the time," said Jürgen Klopp, not long after taking over at a football club that dominated English and European competition in the late 1970s and early 1980s. “And anyway, for me, life at a football club is all about trying to write new stories. I want us to do things that the fans will still talk about in a few years."
So, how do India’s current hockey players, who weren’t even born when the last of the eight Olympic golds was won, deal with the history that comes with the shirt? “It is great to be part of such a rich hockey heritage and to be adding to it constantly," says P.R. Sreejesh, who will lead the side in Rio de Janeiro. “So many of us have grown up with this, and it is this that has given rise to so many of us too. At no point of time should we forget it. But that said, we are never pressured by it either. You cannot let these things—numbers, statistics and history—work with your head."
Sardar Singh, Sreejesh’s predecessor as captain, agrees. “We never lose touch of what our past is," he says. “It is something ingrained into each of us, as athletes, as Indians. The truth is that the glorious past is too far behind us now. I wasn’t even born the last time we won a medal at the Olympics.
“Since then, forget hockey, even our country has entirely changed. This pressure would’ve probably weighed heavier on our seniors, the players in the transition period. For us, there are still frontiers to be breached and boundaries to be crossed. We are in charge of creating history now."
Manpreet Singh, a half-back, jokes that Punjab has villages that have “more Olympic medallists than ATMs", but stresses that times have changed. Irrevocably. “Without meaning any offence, I think it is time we all realized that the hockey we play today is nothing like the hockey they played in the pre-AstroTurf era," he says. “Almost like tennis has an Open Era and a pre-Open Era, hockey too has it."
The legends of the past have always been encouraging, says V.R. Raghunath, a full-back. “They understand how much the game has changed since they played it," he says. “This isn’t a defence of ourselves, or of this generation; it is just what it is. The time that India was a powerhouse was a time when hockey was played on grass, the emphasis was on skill and the rules to combat physicality were much more strictly applied.
“The weight of history is always upon an athlete when he is off the field. Honestly, it is impossible to be thinking about India’s great past when you are involved in a slugfest at 1-1 on the field. You cannot be playing that way," says Raghunath.
If it all plays out according to the world rankings, India, currently No.5, have a semi-final chance. But as Barbosa could tell them, sport is a fairy tale only for a select few.
A month before his death in 2000, he was interviewed on television. A dignified, soft-spoken man, he said: “That (the goal he conceded) was the only reason I’m not forgotten by history. Even after I die, people will still blame the loss on me.
“Whether I failed or not, there’s no way to go back in time. That’s it."
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