PAKISTAN hockey has reached a dead end. The national team’s winless streak at the Hockey World Cup in Bhubaneswar, India saw them crashing out in the pre-quarters — which is perhaps the final straw for a game that has experienced an ignominious downward spiral for nearly two decades now. Pakistan’s ill-fated campaign at the mega event, though, has not stirred the relevant quarters, despite the pre-tournament bragging by the Pakistan Hockey Federation officials, which tells us that spectators, sponsors and broadcasters alike are discerning. For long, a string of inconsistent and pathetic performances by the national team have brought the game at a crossroads in Pakistan. However, quite obviously, for the mandarins who run hockey, the priorities lay elsewhere.

The harsh truth is that Pakistan hockey has been reduced to being a game of musical chairs, where the prolific Olympians of yesteryear have taken turns to deprive it of its former glory and funds alike. Corruption, nepotism, maladministration, absence of vision and a preponderance of power plays have been key factors in the decline of a game Pakistan so brilliantly dominated from the late 1960s to mid 1990s. Quite regretfully, instead of putting together the best-possible combinations, working out strategies and ironing out players’ deficiencies, especially for competitive tournaments like the World Cup and the Asian Games, the administrators have been focussing on extending their multiple terms at the office while the governments, too, have continued to turn a blind eye. That has resulted in debilitating infrastructure, lack of stars, substandard coaches, an illogical domestic calendar, dwindling sponsorship money and an ever-shrinking national circuit. The hockey team, after having returned empty handed yet again, must now negotiate a long and arduous qualification process for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics. Among the many challenges at hand for Imran Khan’s newly-elected regime, one of the stiffest will be to put the game of hockey back on the right track by adopting revolutionary measures to revive the fortunes of this historic sport.

Published in Dawn, December 14th, 2018