It was a struggling, stuttering, face-saving bronze that Pakistan had got at the Asia Cup, but just as it went a step further — the four-nation Asia-Oceania outing — the worth of the regional bronze was set in its proper perspective. With not even a single drawn game in four outings — and a record 1-9 margin of defeat against champions Australia — it does not take much to imagine what it would be like in a world tournament.
There are always feelers put out in the national media about a foreigner soon being handed the team to coach and manage, with his physical trainer of choice — a foreigner, naturally. If it happens, it will not be the first time such a folly would have been committed. We have been down that road a few times and this is where we have found ourselves; languishing in the deepest, darkest and dreariest of deep, dark, dreary holes.
It is surprising that successive Pakistan Hockey Federation administrations, including the incumbents, have continued to underestimate the value of the grassroots in any long-term plan to be competitive in international hockey. Forget about ‘regaining lost glory’ and ‘being back on the top in a game where we ruled the roost’ and all that blah blah blah. Let’s settle for a more realistic target of being competitive, which means not being pushovers.
There is hardly a chance of ‘regaining the lost glory’ ever on the hockey field, but we can still be competitive on the world stage if we can resist the temptation of the here and the now
When we talk of the long run, the perception is that we are talking of some distant future. And that alone is enough for us — the policymakers, basically — to steer clear of the path because we, as a nation, believe in the here-and-now stuff even when we deliver sermons on accountability of the afterlife variety. If we do it today, somebody else will get the credit when the results start to come in. Where’s the fun in that?
The fact is, had we started our ‘long-term’ journey back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when our fall from grace was obvious even to those who were too blind to read the writing on the wall, we would have by now completed that process at least twice over and the momentum would have been taking us forward, not backwards as is the case right now.
There is some energy even today at the junior level. Among other things, our outfit did win reasonably well in Australia earlier in the year, after hopes of a decent outing in the Junior World Cup stood shattered owing to geopolitics because the tournament was held in India.
The problem is that the Junior string is basically Under-21 and some of the lads there do contest a spot in the national side as well. The thing to do is to go down the ladder and focus on younger streams like, say, the Under-14s and the Under-16s. By enlarging the pool, by harnessing the talent in that pool, and by getting them trained — and nourished — along modern lines, we may still have hope of being competitive on a sustained basis.
The key is to keep the cycle galvanised and keep expanding it notch by notch all the way down to the college and school levels.
The glory of the past, which is actually working against us rather than for us, owed its origin to this phenomenon. The only difference is that it was a natural cycle. Go back a few decades down memory lane and you would recall — or somebody would do it for you from among your elders — young boys playing hockey on the streets and in the grounds, just as they used to play cricket. In fact, the pattern had a seasonal touch about it. The boys would play cricket when it was cricket season, and would bring out their hockey sticks the moment some international hockey contest involving Pakistan would begin. Even though on a much smaller scale, the same applied to football as well. All this is no more the case.
Now, only the diehards pick up their sticks. Cricket season has become a year-long entity, and with the media constantly pressing on the accelerator, the euphoria never ends. Interestingly, most of the world powers in hockey — Holland, Germany, South Korea, Spain, and even emerging ones such as Malaysia, China and Japan — have no serious cricketing outfits in their ranks. With the exception of Australia, which is the only country to have its cricket and hockey teams doing equally well on the international circuit, others such as Pakistan, India and England have all suffered dwindling fortunes in hockey.
When the natural cycle of mass involvement in hockey came to an end, it called for more and more concentrated efforts on the part of the administrators. But the lax attitude of successive helmsmen hampered any effort to stem the tide. And when that happened, we, as is our wont, started remembering and recalling how great was the past. As if that past would somehow set the present right and ensure a future that would be somewhere close to that past. This is a national pastime so there is hardly any point in blaming the hockey administrators for that. After all, they just did what the nation does and loves to do.
If we could somehow distance ourselves from the rhetoric of ‘regaining lost glory’, we may still be competitive on the international stage in a few years’ time on the basis of some system that we have to put in place today and which we nurture with professional patience. It may sound like a long shot, but it’s the only shot.
Published in Dawn, EOS, November 19th, 2017
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