In the recent Olympics in Paris, the Indian men’s hockey team won the bronze medal. The country celebrated the success. It had won the bronze medal in the Tokyo Olympics in 2021. Many of those who watched the semi-final match between India and Germany in the Paris Olympics would have felt that, with better luck, India would have gone into the final to play the gold medal match. But back-to-back bronze is something to be happy about. Winning back-to-back medals shows consistency. This had happened forty-one years after—it was in 1968 and 1972 that India had won back-to-back bronze. A month after the Paris Olympic success, India became the champions in the Asian Championship Trophy. A year before, India had won the gold medal in the Asian Games. In the world ranking now, India is in the fifth position, and no other team from Asia is in the first ten positions. Malaysia is in the 13th, and Korea is in the 18th. All these have given hockey lovers in the country the feeling that things are on the right track and that India would win the Olympic gold medal sooner rather than later. What is often forgotten is that in the Hockey World Cup 2023, held in Bhubaneswar, in which sixteen teams had participated, India ended up in the 9th position. But it is always the case that, in every aspect of life, the latest success wipes out the unpleasant memory of an earlier failure. Besides, people in India emotionally connect with the Olympic tournament, not with the Hockey World Cup tournament. The exact opposite, by the way, is the case with football. The Football World Cup is far more highly valued by football lovers all over the world than the Olympics football.
As we were celebrating our bronze medal finish and talking in between about how narrowly we missed playing in the final, I was thinking of another day. That was in 1960. Our hockey team had just won the silver medal. Although no one was criticizing the team for losing the final to Pakistan by the slenderest margin, there was disappointment all over. I was in my first-year BA (Hons.) and none of us, hockey lovers, in Ravenshaw College, was celebrating. If anyone celebrated the silver medal victory, it must have been the Indian Hockey Federation.
Some experts suggested that it wasn’t all that terribly bad because, after all, we had lost to Pakistan and not to a European country. The Indian (some used the politically correct term, namely, the “sub-continental”) style of hockey, with emphasis on attack, intelligent dribbling, and graceful play, had prevailed, not the defensive, aesthetically unappealing European style of hockey.
Today, the disappointment with the silver medal in 1960—incidentally the only silver medal India has got in the Olympics—might look un-understandable. But once one knows the context, one would think it was indeed quite natural. India had won six gold medals by then: in 1928, 32, 36, 48, 52, and 56. The Olympic Games were not held in 1940. Given this awesome record, expecting the gold medal had become a “habit” in people’s minds. There was a warning signal in 1958 when, in the Asian Games, India lost to Pakistan in the final. But given the history of India’s dominance in hockey, many saw it as an aberration and nothing to be really worried about. Then the defeat in the Olympic final came as almost a shock for which they were not prepared. Two years after this, India lost again to Pakistan in the Asian Games, but two years later, in 1964, it defeated Pakistan to regain the Olympic gold. After 16 years, in 1980, India won the Olympic gold again. There was the usual celebration, but no one missed that the shine was missing on the gold. Most of the best teams in the world had not participated in that edition of the Olympic Games in Moscow because of a boycott.
In 1968 and then in the 1972 Olympics, India won back-to-back bronze. People were trying to come to terms with the fact that India was no longer the hockey superpower that it was and that the “gold days” were almost over. India won the gold medal in the Hockey World Cup in 1975, but that didn’t change the perception. As just mentioned, the gold in 1980 was duly celebrated, but it didn’t make the fans feel very optimistic about the future. The Indian team for the 1984 Olympics had great quality, but it didn’t live up to the expectations; it ended up in the 5th position. As for myself, I wasn’t really terribly disappointed, thinking of the highly talented Brazilian football team in the 1982 Football World Cup. It was arguably—some said “decidedly”—the best team in that competition, but it did not even reach the quarterfinal stage. The best doesn’t always win, be it on the football field, the hockey field, or in life. In any case, the 5th place finish was India’s best till the Tokyo Olympics in 2021.
Looking back, one could say that the downslide started in the early seventies. India did not qualify for the 2008 Olympics, and in the 2010 edition of the Hockey World Cup, in which 12 teams had participated, it finished 8th.
Many think, as I do, that the downslide started with the introduction of the synthetic turf. India finished seventh in the 1976 Olympics when, for the first time, the game was played on such turf. For almost more than a decade, Indian hockey players hardly had adequate practice on synthetic turf before they went to participate in international tournaments. And equally importantly, our hockey experts failed to take note of the change that AstroTurf was going to bring about in the game. We satisfied ourselves by saying that all this was a Western conspiracy to end the supremacy of the subcontinent in the game. Now, whether there was a conspiracy or not, synthetic turf certainly suited the European style of play.
The experts debated on whether India should continue to play its traditional style of hockey or change to the defense-oriented European style, and related to this, whether or not India should have foreign coaches, who knew the European style much better, and the decision was almost always against change and foreign coaches. So India continued to play the game in the same old style, continued to forget that hockey was no longer the same game that it was before 1976, and it continued to lose, both at the Olympics and the World Cup, and hit new lows. We did see some (only some) encouraging change in the style of play in the 2010 World Cup, with most players not hanging on to the ball too long, for example. But we realized that we were way behind the best in this competition, and we did not fail to notice that the team still tended to depend on individual brilliance (not that much “brilliance” was in view, to be realistic), and other traditional habits.
To end this narrative, one might say that the process of revival started in right earnest after the poor show in the 2010 World Cup. India accepted the reality and tried to change its style of play, and the results have started showing, the most encouraging being the back-to-back bronze at the Tokyo and Paris Olympics. Our celebration of the success in the Paris Olympics is eminently justified. The hockey world would have to take India more seriously now, and we can expect India to be a potential podium finisher at global events.
(The views expressed are the writer’s own)
Prof. B.N.Patnaik
Retd. Professor of Linguistics and English, IIT Kanpur
Email: [email protected]
(Images from the net)