BEFORE taking up anything serious, let me wish a happy new year and very happy Eid Mubarak to all my readers. I hope and pray that the new year will prove to be much better than what it was like in 2006 not just at individual level but also in collective terms as a nation. As for hockey, I guess we will have to offer a separate and exclusive prayer session because there is a rather desperate need for divine intervention!

Jokes apart, the year 2006 was a terrible year for Pakistan Hockey where hardly anything went right. It was an unusually hectic year for the national team and perhaps that was one of the reasons for its dismal performance. The team did start off well with a series victory against India, but Indian hockey itself is not having the best of times in recent years. So the victory meant precious little, and when put to tougher tests, the national team got exposed.

After the series against India, the team went to play the Commonwealth Games where it got the silver medal behind Australia. The medal was okay, as no one expected the team to beat the Australians, but it was the performance of the team against lowly ranked sides in the competition that was upsetting. In the semi-final, for instance, Pakistan could beat England only by a golden goal in extra time.

The next assignment on the list was the World Cup qualifiers about which I was pretty optimistic that the team would encounter no problem. As it turned out, the question mark kept dangling against the team’s name on the list. It all came down to the last couple of matches where the team had to win the game against England, which it did, and had to play at least a drawn encounter with Ireland, which, thank God, it did. And we finally made it by the skin of our teeth.

I was wrong in my assessment ahead of the qualifying rounds, as I had thought it would be easy and that the team would win hands down, but it was not to be. Also, I had thought that the team would not just qualify but would head the list of qualifiers, but that was not to be either. The team had to fight every inch of its way, and yet it finished away from the victory stand, taking the fourth position behind New Zealand, South Korea and England. The only qualifier behind Pakistan was Japan, which surely was not a very healthy sign for the fate of the game in the country.

At the Azlan Shah Cup, Pakistan started well with a victory over the Dutch, but the promise fizzled out there and then, as the team then played a drawn game against New Zealand before going down to Argentina. Even the 3-3 draw against New Zealand fully exposed the shortcomings of the Pakistanis. It was always the Kiwis who took the lead, leaving the Pakistanis to do all the chasing. It was a last-gasp penalty corner conversion that saved the day for the team. The quality of the New Zealand team may well be gauged by the fact that the same outfit was thrashed by the Australians when the two met in the second stage of the competition.

At the Champions Trophy, it was time for Holland to avenge their defeat, and they did it big time, scoring as many as nine goals. Worse still, the mere fact that Holland scored nine goals against Pakistan does not portray the gravity of the situation even though it meant a goal scored every eight minutes or less. Even worse was the fact that eight of those goals happened to be field goals which betrayed a totally shattered Pakistani defense with wooden feet and paralysed bodies.

For the second Champions Trophy running, Pakistan could barely manage to remain in the loop for the next edition by way of its two victories against Argentina; 2-1 in the league round, and 3-1 in the classification tie. A quick look at the points table at the end of the competition was enough to establish the fact that Pakistan was not just fifth in the six-nation tournament; it was a distant fifth behind Holland, Germany, Spain and Australia.

The performance of the team at the World Cup where the team finished sixth behind Germany, Australia, Spain, South Korea and England, and the Asian Games where it took the bronze behind South Korea and China — yes, China — is a recent incident and I find it practical not to discuss it any further here.

Locating the worst moment in a comprehensively disappointing year is a demanding task. It is a tough choice between Holland’s nine goals against us in the Champions Trophy and the semi-final loss to China at the Asian Games. Make your own choice. For me, they both were equally pathetic and indicative of the malaise that has afflicted Pakistan Hockey in the last few years.