What the Pakistan hockey team with five new faces will achieve in the forthcoming Hamburg tournament remains to be seen, but experimentation and hardworking young players are not such a bad idea.

As predicted, heads rolled in the Pakistan Hockey Federation (PHF) in the wake of the Beijing Olympics debacle.

Manager and Chief Coach Khawaja Zakauddin resigned from the post soon after returning to Pakistan. Coach Naveed Alam followed suit two days later.

Another 10 days passed and Senior Vice-President Khalid Mahmood also stepped down along with the two-member selection committee headed by Islahuddin Siddiqui with Syed Muddasar Asghar as the other member. With them also went those not directly linked with the fiasco such as Marketing Director Pervez Bhindra and Media Director Altaf Sabir.

There was resignation galore within the PHF. But the ones directly responsible for the debacle, the senior players like full back and skipper Zeeshan Ashraf, centre-forward Rehan Butt and midfielder Mohammad Saqlain, who despite being offered all kinds of incentives by PHF Chief Mir Zafarullah Khan Jamali, stubbornly stood their ground, saying that although they were sorry for what had happened, they wanted to play more.

Meanwhile, the Federal Sports Ministry also formulated a three-member enquiry committee headed by former Olympian Abdul Waheed to probe the reasons for Pakistan`s dismal show at the Games.

There was some talk of the Federal Minister for Sports Najamuddin Khan demanding a resignation from Zafarullah Jamali too but as Jamali sahib himself pointed out recently, the minister is out of line. As PHF president, Jamali can only be ordered around by the federation`s patron-in-chief, the prime minister of Pakistan.

Very few people in Pakistan are aware that the federation chief is himself a former hockey player and a very good one at that. There have been letters printed in the `letters to the editor` section of various newspapers saying that since he has never been associated with the sport, he better be going. But they are all confusing him with the former cricket board chairman Dr Nasim Ashraf, who besides being a cricket fan had no playing experience otherwise.

Mir Zafarullah Jamali, on the other hand, has in his youth played hockey for Punjab and was a Punjab University Blue. You don`t really get appointed as a member of the International Hockey Federation (FIH) Jury of Appeal to conduct the 29th hockey tournament at the Olympics for nothing. And Jamali in Beijing was the first president of the PHF to have achieved this honour. Besides, senior sources within the PHF also say that they don`t want Jamali to step down as according to them, he is the one bringing in most of the funds.

So amidst talk of revamping and restructuring the PHF, the federation`s top brass, that is the president and secretary along with the national junior team coach Jehangir Butt, decided to step up and select a squad for the upcoming three-day (Oct 3-5) quadrangular tournament in Germany, the Hamburg Masters, also featuring Belgium and Malaysia besides the Olympic champion hosts and Pakistan. Doing so, they took a bold step in deciding to rest many of the senior players while picking younger boys. The team has a new skipper too in the form of the 24-year-old forward Shakeel Abbasi, who made his senior team debut some five years ago and is considered to be one of the world`s most promising players. Jehangir Butt has been given the assignment of coaching. Meanwhile, former skipper Zeeshan Ashraf along with midfielders Mohammad Saqlain, Adnan Maqsood, centre-forward Rehan Butt and even goalkeeper Salman Akbar weren`t considered for the tournament. As many as eight of the 16-member Beijing squad are out for now.

What the new squad with five new faces will achieve at Hamburg still remains to be seen but experimentation and upgrading hardworking young players is not such a bad thing. Besides being stuck at the eighth position and not just at the Beijing Games but also in world rankings, has us as good (or bad) as touching rock bottom. So we can only move sideways and do as bad or bounce back.

Then in order to save the dying sport in Pakistan, the PHF, well actually its dynamic young secretary Asif Bajwa, also came up with a four-year plan that he announced to the media at the Hockey Club of Pakistan last week to make sure the national sport doesn`t slip any further. And his ideas make a lot of sense. Yes, the PHF is getting a foreign coach but not for the senior team. Bajwa wants to do exactly what hockey legend, the `Flying Horse` Samiullah had suggested in an interview for the sports pages on August 21, the day Pakistan lost their 7-8 position match to New Zealand 4-2 to end up eighth at Beijing.

“There is no harm in getting another foreign coach but it should be done for the Under-17 boys. That way even the U-19 and U-20 boys who lie their way into the U-17 camps would benefit,” he had said.

So Bajwa who was himself a brilliant former player and part of Pakistan`s World Cup-winning 1994 hockey squad, is going to get a coach from either Holland or Germany or Australia to manage the 12 grooming cen tres that he wants to establish all over Pakistan. It would be the responsibility of the foreign coach to also create a uniform teaching method on a set PHF syllabus.

With a focus on the development of hockey involving schools and clubs along with introducing a proper league system, Bajwa`s plan also underlines the importance of technical proficiency. “We will regularise the grooming of technical officials with the training of umpires and coaches in order to fill the shortage of technical officials here,” he announced at the press conference.

Other plans include regular school hockey and club tournaments from the district to the national level as well as a new hockey league championship called `Super Hockey` with prizes worth $100,000 for the winners.

“After the execution of this plan, I promise you that Pakistan will at least reach the podium in the 2012 London Olympics. And I am saying this with confidence,” said the former team manager and chief coach. But then seeing the media people give a knowing smile as PHF officials in recent years have been known to make such tall claims, Bajwa smiled too. “I am not saying that we are going to the major events. But I know that we are going to improve gradually from the eighth position that we have landed ourselves into. We will go from strength to strength.”