WITH the national team’s ignominious failure to qualify for the Rio de Janeiro Olympics 2016 at the World Hockey League semi-finals in Antwerp, Belgium, Pakistan hockey has reached a dead end. The recent fiasco, which has come on the heels of an equally humiliating disqualification from the Hockey World Cup in 2014, caps a disastrous period spanning some two decades which has been replete with losses and setbacks with only a few laurels coming the players’ way. Though the Antwerp humiliation has been termed as Pakistan hockey’s darkest hour, there have been countless such occasions in the recent past which clearly put in the shade decades of glory and success achieved by the country in the annals of the game. Bad luck can intrude unexpectedly and play havoc with a player or a team’s progress. Still, Pakistan has no such excuses to offer for its defeat to a lowly-ranked Ireland on Friday or to other less-equipped outfits earlier in the tournament that led to this final blow.

But while the players have erred badly, the blame for hockey’s overall shambolic state lies squarely with the Pakistan Hockey Federation and its utterly incompetent and, often corrupt, regimes. It is ironic that many of the game’s ex-Olympians who once did the country proud by excelling on the field, have been instrumental in blotting the national game’s impeccable record by either indulging in needless ego tussles or resorting to selfish gains at the game’s expense. It is, indeed, a shocking scenario today where out of the 18 hockey training centres or academies, none can be seen as operational anywhere in the country. An overhaul is imperative, with stringent measures in place to keep the incompetent and corrupt out of the PHF set-up. However, with politics having saturated the PHF rank and file and with governments overly keen to run the game through their handpicked officials there is little hope that any serious effort for the revival of the national sport will be made in the near future.

Published in Dawn, July 6th, 2015

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