LAHORE: A poor diet, lack of preparation and unnecessary changes in the squad after every tournament were main impediments to hockey team’s success, said captain Mohammad Imran on Tuesday, with the recent failure in Antwerp meaning the green-shirts won’t be featuring in the 2016 Rio Games.

“Naan Cholay [bread and chick peas] eaters cannot achieve the desired results and no one should have expected victory in the Hockey World League semi-finals,” maintained captain Imran having arrived here from Belgium via Islamabad after his team slumped to eighth position in the HWL which served as qualifying round for the Rio Olympics.

Top five teams of the round qualified for the Rio Games with the green-shirts failing to secure spot for the Olympics for the first time in their rich 67-year hockey history.

“You can’t imagine what poor level of our preparation was for the matches against Ireland and France,” remarked the captain while stating that practical steps were needed for the resurrection of the game of hockey.

“We have to think seriously about how we should resurrect our dying national game. We will have to promote hockey at the grass-roots level by introducing it in schools, colleges and clubs,” said Imran.

Pakistan played seven matches in the qualifying round, winning just one pool match against Poland besides playing two drawn games against India and France with Aussies — the winners of the qualifying round— mauling them 1-6 in another pool match.

Before losing the fifth place match to the lowly-ranked Ireland to squander their chances of qualifying for the Rio Games besides crumbling down like a house of cards against France to finish eighth, the greenshirts lost the quarter-final 1-2 against England in Antwerp.

Talking about financial crisis of the Pakistan Hockey Federation (PHF), Imran said that everybody knew about the difficult situation the hockey federation was in but hardly any one took any notice.

Expressing bittersweet reaction to the probe committee formed on the orders of the prime minister, he said the step must be welcomed but notice must have been taken much earlier.

Nonetheless, he said that the action taken by the prime minister should not be a cosmetic one and must deal with basic players’ issues including providing jobs to them.

“The players should be provided jobs so that they should not be worried about their children’s future,” he commented.

Answering a question, Imran said now many people were raising hue and cry over the debacle but they never made their contribution when the players were making appeals continuously to everyone for easing out their financial crisis.

“Even the players made all-out efforts by setting aside their financial issues with the PHF but our preparations did not match up to the standards of France, Ireland and other participating teams,” he said.

Asked if the team was selected with his consent, Imran said it was the job of the national selection committee to pick the squad and they must have selected the best possible one.

However, he lamented some changes made to the squad, saying: “It was not the right way to make a couple of changes after every tournament as we did in the last three events (tour of Australia, South Korea and now in the qualifying round).

Answering yet another question, he said resignation was no solution to hockey problems, adding that if resignation on part of anyone including him could serve Pakistan hockey, he was ready to quit.

“All undeserving people must go and good ones should remain to bring more good people to raise the level of the national game,” Imran further said.

The captain, on the other hand, admitted that his team could not create a good number of penalty-corners, saying the forward line failed to click.

“In the previous tournaments, penalty-corner conversion has been our main strength as we got penalty-corners at an average of six per match which enabled us to cash in on two or three but this time we got less short-corners and thus converted less,” maintained the captain.

Published in Dawn, July 8th, 2015

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