Lounge
2024: Indian hockey's year of resurgence
Summary
Indian hockey’s 2024 was marked by triumph and transition with the men’s team winning Olympic bronze and the women’s team rebounding from a dismal start
Go hard, boys, go hard!"
P.R. Sreejesh’s booming voice cut right through the heavy beats of the Punjabi hip-hop song blaring through the speakers of the spacious, well-equipped gym at Kalinga Stadium in Bhubaneswar, Odisha.
Then Sreejesh strode to a bar loaded with 80 kilos worth of plates to rep some fierce deadlifts with perfect form, earning a roar of approval from the 20-odd players of the Indian hockey team at the gym.
Sreejesh smiled—a trademark ear-to-ear grin that has lit up Indian hockey for nearly two decades.
“Don’t go by the smile," he said. “It’s just a few months to the Paris Olympics, so what we are doing right now is giving everything we have to ensure we are absolutely ready. Today I was out on the turf for almost four hours in the heat. Now I’m in the gym. It’s non-stop…all the way to the Olympics!"
Non-stop. That’s not a bad phrase to describe the year that Indian hockey had in 2024. Saturated with action and emotion, a big high and a dismal low, and a hopeful resurrection of an event that may change the game worldwide to bring the year to a close.
The big high, of course, was that India won the bronze at the Paris Olympics in August, the team’s first back-to-back Olympic medals (after the bronze in Tokyo 2020) in 50 years—the last time India won successive medals was Mexico 1968 and Munich 1972.
It was not just the medal, but the way in which it was won that made this a special year for the Indian men’s team. The Tokyo bronze was achieved against the odds; India was an unfancied team at the nadir of a 41-year-long slide (the gap since India won an Olympic medal before Tokyo), effecting a great coup. In Paris, India took to the Astroturf like they belonged among the world’s best. After a couple of tentative games, India were visibly as good as defending champions Belgium (who they lost to narrowly), beat Australia, their bogey team, for the first time since the 1972 Games, held on to their lead playing with just 10 men for most of the match against a Great Britain team operating at their peak, and lost to Germany in the semi-final in a game that could have gone either way, despite being deprived of the services of Amit Rohidas, the team’s defensive stalwart. Every match the Indian team played was a thriller.
No one thrilled more than the team’s captain Harmanpreet Singh, who patrolled the defence like a lion and scored goal after goal with his ferocious drag-flicks (10 in all, the highest goalscorer in Paris), and Sreejesh, who, like he has done for almost the entirety of his two-decade long career, made breathtaking saves that put him squarely among the best goalkeepers in the world, including a crucial penalty save against Great Britain that put India in the semis.
Also read: Paris Olympics 2024: The hunger driving India's hockey team
If the Tokyo bronze was a glimmer of hope for a once-mighty team long relegated to the shadows, the Paris bronze was the performance of a team that had found its footing once again.
“It was bittersweet," Harmanpreet said about the Paris medal. “We really believed that we will be in the final. But it also says something about the mentality of the team that we shrugged off our loss (to Germany in the semis) and played at our best against Spain (in the bronze medal match)."
One of the unforgettable images from India’s Olympic campaign in Paris was of Sreejesh, sitting, meditating all alone, astride the crossbar of his goal at the end of the bronze medal match.
He was saying farewell to the arena that had defined his life and his dreams. That 2-1 victory against Spain was the last match for arguably the most iconic hockey player India has produced since Dhanraj Pillay.
“I knew before the Olympics that I will retire in Paris," Sreejesh said, “Go out on the big stage…and I told my teammates, ‘this is my final chance!’ I loved the game, and the game loved me back, no doubt."
Sreejesh’s place was taken by his longtime protégé Krishan Pathak, ensuring a smooth transition to a new era for Indian hockey. Pathak, who has been mentored by Sreejesh since the 2016 Junior World Cup, made a victorious start to his India career as the team won the year-ending Asian Champions Trophy.
All this success came amidst the Indian team making a transition in the way they play. Under coach Craig Fulton, who took over the reigns in July 2023, the focus shifted from India’s traditional attacking play and reliance on individual skills to a system based on the foundation of a rock-solid defence and intricate passing and positional play.
“Instinct and flair have always been the strengths of Indian hockey," said the South African former Olympian. “What I’m looking for is the balance between having the freedom to express themselves, but having a really organised structure defensively to fall back on. And so this team is still very much a work in progress, and these systems need to trickle down to the age group teams as well so there is a better supply of players who know the modern game."
The Indian women’s hockey team is a work in progress too, only they started the year on a dismal note—failing to qualify for the Olympics at the final qualifying event at home, after they finished fourth at the Tokyo Games, the best-ever performance by them. Between the wild see-saw of Tokyo and Paris, there was the story of a team in transition (almost all the senior players who made huge contributions in Tokyo were not in contention by the time the team was playing qualifiers for Paris), and internal acrimony (their American coach Janneke Schopman, who was the assistant coach in Tokyo before taking over the team, left after a spat with Hockey India officials).
“It is difficult to describe how sad and broken we were," Salima Tete, the Indian women’s team captain, said. “After Tokyo, to not even make it to Paris…the Olympics is everything for us. It was the worst time for us."
Under new coach Harendra Singh, the team had only one way to go—up.
With a bunch of teenagers and rookies making their debuts, the Indian women’s team got their act together by the end of the year, beating Paris Games silver medallists China to the Asian Champions Trophy title.
Finally, there was the revival of the Hockey India League after a gap of seven years. With eight men’s teams (matches starting 28 December) and four women’s teams (for the first ever Hockey India Women’s League, with matches starting 12 January), the event has a lot riding on it.
Hockey is a sport that has long been niche—it has a strong domestic following in just a handful of European countries, which run their own leagues. FIH, the global body for the sport, estimates around 30 million people play hockey regularly, in contrast to the hundreds of millions who play football. There is very little money in the sport, and almost no revenue from broadcast rights.
If there is a route to bringing in more money and visibility in the game, India, where hockey was once the sport of choice before cricket consumed everything, it will probably lead the way.
India’s obsession with cricket now ensures that the sport thrives globally, with players making huge sums of money at the IPL and administrators making windfalls through mega broadcast deals driven by the Indian market for the sport.
Can hockey follow this model? The FIH sure hopes so—three of the last four men’s World Cups were held in India. Yet, the first edition of the HIL, which began with glitzy fanfare in 2013, died a quiet death in 2017. It found few takers.
To be sure, Indian hockey was still thrashing around in the dark back then, with no Olympic medal to act as a lightning rod to popularity.
Things are different now, though there is one caveat: outside of the IPL, there is not a single example of a sport that has been able to make a league survive as a business in India. Hockey India will have to think in radical terms (read: give up all control to a professional, independent business set-up) to make HIL buck that trend.
Rudraneil Sengupta is the author of Enter the Dangal, Travels through India’s Wrestling Landscape.
Also read: Sports in 2024: A year of promise fulfilled and a rest for the future
