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Guess who is the champion of the Australian National Junior Hockey competition. It might take some doing if you don’t follow the news loop. So here, quickly, is the answer: Pakistan. Interesting, right? But, frankly, it is more ironic than interesting. After all, it was a domestic title that was clinched by a foreign outfit. Apparently, like the Pakistanis themselves, the Australians had not expected such an outcome. It was basically about giving — and getting — exposure to competitive hockey, but the rub of the green went the way of the lads in green.
It is clearly a rare moment in Pakistan hockey for a top finish is something that many mainstream players in the last couple of decades have not tasted while donning national colours. Things have been so bad actually that it would not surprise anyone if a club side from Europe or Oceania went away with our own national championship … or even if it thrashed the national side black and blue.
In fact, a few years ago Pakistan had participated in a three-nation tournament in Australia, and finished fourth. Yes, fourth in a three-nation outing. The anomaly can be rationalised by the fact that Australia had fielded two sides, but the irony of finishing fourth in a three-nation contest cannot be just laughed away.
The success of the national junior hockey team in Australia should be taken for what it is: a rare victory
While the sitting officials of Pakistan Hockey Federation (PHF) have every reason to felicitate the team and portray it as a milestone on the road to recovery, even they in their hearts know. Nobody is going to even think of starting to believe in what has become the rather stale cliché of ‘efforts to regain lost glory’. It’s not going to happen, folks. Though we all know it for sure, we don’t say it because of reasons ranging from denial to vested interests.
The most common argument one gets to hear in this regard is, arguably, the funniest of them all — that Pakistanis, once they get down to doing something, can do anything. And, by that token, we just have to get down to doing it, and things will start happening before you know it. The argument, frankly, goes beyond — much beyond — the domain of hockey, or sports at large. It’s a mindset indicative of a mass denial nurtured and boosted by vested interest.
Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel said Samuel Johnson, and Oscar Wilde is believed to have called it the virtue of the vicious. But we probably don’t need a scoundrel or someone vicious to lead us up the garden path. At least we don’t need one anymore. We, as a nation, are a self-sufficient lot, it seems, who are out to reword Karl Marx and use patriotism as the opium of the masses.
Just because we are Pakistanis means nothing. It’s time we actually believed it. If anything, our stature in the eyes of the world is what it is because of results we have produced over the years that owe their origin to certain characteristics that are typically Pakistani. For instance, a lack of professionalism, an absence of structures, always finding the enemy outside, and so on.
Pakistan hockey’s fall from grace was as spectacular as its supremacy once was. In 1978, Pakistan’s trophy closet was brimming with honours. We had the World Cup, the Asian Games and the Champions Trophy. Besides, it was also the year when bilateral sports ties resumed with India, which was the other established powerhouse in world hockey. That Pakistan could beat their rivals with massive and impressive margins also underlined its supremacy. In short, we had everything that came our way. The only title missing from the cabinet was the Olympics, at which Pakistan had taken the bronze medal in Montreal, 1976. The next Games were due for Moscow 1980 and there was reason to be hopeful of a complete sweep, but, as it happened, we never participated in the Games because the Americans wanted us — and the world at large — to boycott Moscow.
It has been just about four decades since then and our journey has been downhill. We did pick up titles here and there because the momentum of the past sustained us for some time. Also, there were victories out of individual brilliance. But that has been that. Nothing more. Over the last two decades, we ourselves feel surprised when, and if, we beat any side worth its name in the world of hockey. We feel good when we do well in qualifying rounds of tournaments where we have a direct path all the way to the final. And we don’t feel all that bad when we miss the cut, which is not a rarity anymore.
And all this while we keep finding faults elsewhere. First we blamed the Astroturf, then it was the bending of the rules by the International Hockey Federation, then the change in the format, and then this, and then that. And, yes, there is always some bad luck thrown into the mix to rationalise our poor placement at the finishing line in tournaments where we do end up qualifying.
While playing with passion the blame game, we avoid with greater passion one crucial element in the equation: ourselves. We keep telling ourselves that there is no dearth of talent in the country and all we have to do is to harness it. This is the equivalent of someone saying he has a tyre, and all that remains is the buying of the car. But what if there is not even a tyre to start with? There is no talent, folks. And it is because nobody is playing hockey anymore, which, in turn, is because no one is promoting the game at the fundamental levels anymore.
The national hockey circuit, practically, comprises no more than 30-35 players representing any degree of talent or potential. This is not a national talent pool to shout about. And then there is the fitness issue which shrinks the pool considerably. Only then come the technical aspects that coaches get to work on. Without addressing these basic issues, nothing is going to change for the better even if we happen to be patriots of the diehard variety.
Published in Dawn, EOS, May 7th, 2017
