Next stick to Hockey

Hockey different, It is not so much India’s failure to make it to the Olympics that is alarming but the fact that, barring a few exceptions, most people have lost serious interest in the fate of Indian hockey.

Indians overall just do not care.

“Whoa whoa” you say. “Hold on. Lack of passion for hockey? Speak for yourself. No-one has lost interest in hockey, everybody is behind the national team.” However this kind of “support” for hockey is frequently in the same vein as our support for “art cinema” or “classical literature” —we know it’s good for us and we know we should and we do claim we do but ultimately it’s not something that we would wake up at 3 am in the night for.
Advertisers know this. So do administrators. And yet the charade of “the national game” and the supposed emotional connect continues.

Here’s a test. Ask the man in the street if he cares for hockey. The odds are he will say “Chak De India, of course”. Ask him to name 5 players who played in 2007 Asian Cup (which we won) and you will see him stuttering. Ask him for all the cricketers who played in the 2007 cricket World Cup (where we were eliminated first round) and he will even spell their names backwards for you.

Cricket. The big evil python that has supposedly sucked out all the resources from hockey and other sports. Any discussion about the declining standards of Indian hockey inevitably brings up the issue of cricket and India’s obsession with it to the exclusion of everything else. Ask any hockey player or administrator and cricket somehow is always the villain — all those cricket stars get all the money and the attention and we get nothing.Ask any hockey player or administrator and cricket somehow is always the villain — all those cricket stars get all the money and the attention and we get nothing.

I personally do not see it that way. Cricket, just like hockey, started in the same state of abject penury.Except that hockey has remained that way whereas cricket has taken off, on its own strength. Not through government fiat, not through a 49.5% quota or a 15% subsidy but by its ability to create a market for itself.

Was cricket’s ascension largely a matter of luck? Blaming cricket for hockey is like saying “we failed because you succeeded”. Thats just lame.Again the analogy with NFL and NBA is spot on. Basically market rejected hockey because it did not perform. When cricket did nor perform, the same market asked it questions. It made cricket accountable.Even when market asked questions to hockey it did not respond. And soon market lost interest in hockey.

In fact hockey has got more Government support than any other sport. It milked the government cow for more than two decades.

Bottom line is – the market and the system will reject non-performace. Period.There was of course mismanagement, politics and corruption but even cricket has hardly been free from that. The only thing is that in recent years with cricket continuously being under media scrutiny, administrators have been forced to keep their misdemeanors under some amount of control whereas the powers that be in hockey have had a free run with arbitrary chops and changes, blatant politicking, heavy handedness and of course corruption.

The only long-term solution to India’s problems in hockey has to come from the market. In other words—us. Do we really, deep down, still care for hockey? Are a significant number of us going to tune in to a hockey game and watch it even if there is a Twenty20 IPL brouhaha on? Okay forget that. Are a significant number of us going to tune in to a hockey game even when there is nothing on in any of the channels?

If the honest answer to this is no, well then the spirit of Indian hockey may already have moved on from its body.

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