KARACHI: The fake smiles on the faces of Pakistan Hockey Federation (PHF) top brass may give the impression that all is well in national hockey and things are perfectly under control.
However, sources within the national team, which just returned after barely avoiding the wooden spoon to finish seventh among the eight participating teams in the recently concluded 33rd FIH Champions Trophy in Auckland, tell another story.
It is a story about the seniors, the junior players and the troublemakers who continue to make an issue out of small things which eventually hurt the game and damage the country’s image.
In between, there are also PHF’s bad decisions and failure in giving due respect to some of the seniors which they truly deserve.
During September this year, Olympian and frontrunner Shakeel Abbasi was named captain of the team for the International Super Hockey Series and the Tri-Nation Hockey Tournament in Perth, Australia, in place of team’s regular skipper Mohammad Imran who was reportedly suffering from dengue virus at the time.
The national team, under Shakeel Abbasi’s leadership, played well in both the challenging events and achieved the unthinkable by beating world champions Australia on their own turf by 4-3 to win the Tri-Nation series on Nov 3. The team showed its true potential in the contest, hence raising hopes for their next outing — the Champions Trophy.
In a strange move, however, Shakeel Abbasi who returned as the winning captain from the tough Aussie tour was replaced by fit-again Imran at the helm for the Champions Trophy.
How Pakistan flopped in the Auckland event is now history. The green-shirts finished seventh out of eight teams, just as they did four years ago, though the circumstances then were quite different.
“What do you expect when you remove a senior member of the team from captaincy for no apparent reason other than that his much junior predecessor is feeling better now,” a source in the Pakistan hockey team told Dawn on Tuesday on condition of anonymity.
“By doing this you obviously disturb the understanding that the players have developed with their captain.
“Noticing this kind of instability, the troublemakers, too, come out with a free for all which they did. The national hockey team right now is divided into three groups. There are those who back Shakeel Abbasi, those who favour Mohammad Imran as skipper and those who just want to play good hockey while minding their own business,” said one of the sources.
“Shakeel Abbasi stepped down without any hassle. Still there are those who feel it was not fair to the senior pro, specially when there’s so much instability under Imran who has not proved to be a strong leader of men. Besides, Imran is much junior to Shakeel and is not very experienced in the game,” the source pointed out.
“That egged on the troublemakers to manipulate most of his decisions. There is also senior midfielder Waseem Ahmed who backs Mohammad Imran just because he feels he can influence him a lot,” said the source.
“ Waseem is often seen backing the weak or new people in the side just because he can boss them around later,” the source complained.
“Meanwhile, Mohmmad Irfan, Salman Akbar, Mohammad Zubair and Haseem Khan are thorough professionals in the outfit who only want to play and give their all to the game. But even they have been rubbed the wrong way by Waseem and company over really trivial matters. The scolding and insults can be very demoralising, I tell you,” the source added.
“Pakistan, in fact, needs a strong captain who does not tolerate this team politics. It was Pakistan hockey’s loss that a good man and able captain like former Asian Games gold medallist Zeeshan Ashraf was ousted and is now facing a ban for opting to play in the unauhorised World Series Hockey [WSH] in India. We could have done much better with him as captain and Michel van den Heuvel as coach.”