THE Pakistan Hockey Federation has perhaps some of the poorest advisors in the game. This is evident from the new format under which the 52nd National Hockey Championship is being held which will for the first time, in the game’s illustrious national history, produce the spectacle of having two national hockey champions instead of one.
Under the confusing format, the championship started simultaneously on January 3, with inter-departmental contests in Karachi and inter-provincial associations’ events in Peshawar. Pakistan Customs is organizing the 19-team inter-departmental championship at the Hockey Club of Pakistan while the NWFP Hockey Association is holding the inter-provincial association event is being contested by provincial associations of Punjab, Sindh, NWFP, Balochistan, Azad Jammu and Kashmir and Islamabad at Lala Ayub Stadium. The winners of the contest in Karachi will be the inter-departmental national hockey champions, while the winners that emerge from Peshawar will be the provincial associations’ national hockey champions. Thus, there will be two champion teams of national hockey.
Federation sources in Karachi justified the latest format, saying that there is a wide gap in the competitive standard of associations and departmental teams. Associations’ teams are usually beaten by a massive margin when they face departmental teams in the national championship. Most of the matches are a one-sided affair and the associations’ teams, it has been observed, feel dejected and humiliated in the wake of their defeats.
Therefore, in order to encourage the provincial teams, the PHF has decided to hold two separate championships under the new format on experimental basis. Following the championships, the PHF will assess the outcome of the competitions before taking a final decision about the continuation of the new format.
There could hardly be any two opinions that departments enjoy the great advantage of recruiting the best available talent in the country by providing jobs and other facilities in the formation of their teams.
The associations do produce good players but they seldom offer perks good enough to stop them from leaving for a department team. And as long as the departmental teams continue to be associated with the PHF, the associations continue to field weak teams.
According to the hockey scorebook inventor and statistician S.A. Razai, departmental teams have won the national championship 44 times, while the associations in all have seven victories; PIA holds the record of 24 wins. In fact, it has been 41 years since an association team won the national hockey championship. The last to do so was Karachi in 1963 at Rawalpindi.
However, before the introduction of the new format, there used to be two separate championships — departments and provincial associations — and a fixed number of teams from both the tournaments used to qualify for the final round of the national championship. The team winning the final round was declared the national champion. One really wonders what led the PHF to change this system and introduce a new format under which we will have two national hockey champions?
It will be much better if the PHF should reverse its decision of the new format and hold the final round by having four semifinalists of the associations round and eight quarterfinalists of the departments round. The final round can be organized at Lahore a week after the Karachi and Peshawar events conclude on January 9.
There is also a need to discuss the possibility of introducing the national league by having divisions one and two, leagues with relegation and promotion system. We can do away with the present national championship by adopting the national league. However, the introduction of any new system requires detailed discussions with experts of the game before finalizing the programme.
