India's hockey team hits a roadblock

Mint

16 hours ago

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On 9 June in Amsterdam, when India took on the Netherlands in their second match of the European leg of the FIH Pro League, there was little indication of what was to come. India were third on the league standings after a round of home matches, a renaissance squad that had won back-to-back Olympic bronze medals to revive a sport that once defined the country but had long been on terminal support, and on the day, against the No.1 ranked Olympic champion team, it was India that started brighter, faster, and in attack mode. India had lost narrowly to the Netherlands in their opening game of the European leg just two days back, and looked like they were out to even things out.
On 9 June in Amsterdam, when India took on the Netherlands in their second match of the European leg of the FIH Pro League, there was little indication of what was to come. India were third on the league standings after a round of home matches, a renaissance squad that had won back-to-back Olympic bronze medals to revive a sport that once defined the country but had long been on terminal support, and on the day, against the No.1 ranked Olympic champion team, it was India that started brighter, faster, and in attack mode. India had lost narrowly to the Netherlands in their opening game of the European leg just two days back, and looked like they were out to even things out.
As a just reward, India opened the scoring with a hard, fast strike from Abhishek, who only goes by one name, and who has become India's brightest rising hockey star in the last couple of years. The Dutch equalised with a scrappy goal a few minutes later. Nothing special, except for the visible and puzzling change it made to India's approach. With an alarming suddenness, the Indian team lost shape and intent, giving up on coach Craig Fulton's method of hard-pressing and staying compact and aggressive off the ball, a method that had taken the team to that bronze at the Paris Olympics. Instead, the Indian players were scrambling defensively without much purpose. And so, the Dutch scored again.
Finally, it was a slender loss yet again in front of a packed house, 3-2, a game that could be viewed in all sincerity as one where India showed that they were pretty much equal to the best team in the world—except that it marked one of the worst periods in the history of Indian hockey. Over the course of the month, the Indian men would go on to lose all eight of their European leg matches in the Pro League—including a six-goal thrashing from Belgium that ended with the F-word slipping out of coach Fulton's enraged mouth at the mid-game interview—the longest losing streak ever for the Indian men's team in any competition. At the end of June, the Indian men had slipped from the third position to eight, narrowly avoiding relegation, only because Ireland, which finished ninth and last, were on a historic losing streak of their own.
With seven of the eight losses coming via one-goal margins, India's Pro League experience can be analysed as a lesson, a very hard one, but still something that can be, presumably, fixed with the right tactical interventions, and not something that needs wholesale demolition and rebuilding. Yet, it's hard to shake off the sinking feeling that this is not the way it's supposed to go for a team that fought so hard to emerge from a four-decades-long slide from global dominance to international wilderness, a team that won not one, but two consecutive Olympic medals. A team that, in the jubilation of its own revival, and backed by world-class coaching, equipment and data support, was supposed to go from strength to strength.
There were three key takeaways from the Pro League campaign, from three different regions of the field. The first is that India's new goalkeepers, Suraj Karkera and Krishan Pathak, are not in the same league as the recently retired, long-serving genius under the bars, P.R. Sreejesh. It would be unfair on any goalkeeper to be compared to Sreejesh, who, throughout his lengthy career, proved that he was the finest goalie ever to play for India, and one of the best in the history of the game. But that doesn't take away from the fact that Pathak and Karkera need to get better, and fast, to give India a chance to be among the best hockey-playing nations in the world. Belgium's Maxime Van Oost and India's Manpreet Singh.
The second is a tactical challenge for the coach—India fielded its first-choice defence, led by captain Harmanpreet Singh (who has been India's best player on the field for some time now), and featuring experienced stalwarts like Amit Rohidas and Jarmanpreet Singh. Why then were they in disarray at the Pro League? Why did they concede 26 goals? What happened to their zonal awareness and ability to hold shape under pressure? Fulton, who was assistant manager in the Belgium team that won gold at the Tokyo Olympics, is very much a product of the European managerial school, which treats the defence as the foundation on which a team is built.
'The key thing in a game is the turnover (when one team takes control of the ball from the other)," Fulton said to me before the Pro League. 'To win, you need to manage the turnover very, very well."
India did not manage the turnover well and frequently lost the ball in the Pro League matches.
The third takeaway is that India's attacking front needs new blood. Abhishek has been a great find, and Hardik Singh continues to develop as India's finest midfielder, but there is a lack of spark, or even sure-footedness, from the rest. With the Asia Cup scheduled in two months' time at home (27 August to 7 September), and a qualification for the 2026 World Cup for the winner at stake, Fulton needs to decide now how he wants to structure his attack. The 2026 World Cup, one of Fulton's stated targets ('a good team needs to be at least in the World Cup final, as well as win Olympic medals," he said) and the 2026 Asian Games will make next year a critical year for Indian hockey, and any newcomers in the team will need the few months left to these marquee tournaments to fit in.
Penalty corners (PC), which have become the scoring mainstay in the modern game, are also an area of concern for India, and have been for some years. The problem is simple: when Harmanpreet takes a PC, all is good, because he is among the best PC specialists in the world; but when it's not him, the dip in quality is too massive.
One of the reasons India managed a revival on the global stage is the intensive work that was put in to develop hockey at the grassroots level in the country, including the installation of scores of Astroturf, of which there were abysmally few till only a decade back. But while the base of the sports development pyramid has been painstakingly built, India still lacks half of the structure. Because all team sports need a league to develop, and India has struggled to keep a domestic league afloat.
The Hockey India League played its inaugural season in 2013 and folded just four seasons later in financial and administrative disarray. The league only restarted in 2024, but this revived edition too has seen enough financial and administrative problems to warrant a question mark as to its sustainability.
'I think the biggest difference coming from Europe to here is that there is a league system in Europe where any team will get to play 22 games, and then there are playoffs and a final," Fulton said to me just before the Hockey India League was revived last year. 'So you get a really good competitive environment, different tactics, really good coaching. But in India, at the provincial and district tournaments, you only play one way—five up, five back, one attacks, one defends, there's nothing in the middle, and off they go. So there are quite a few steps to be made here on the educational and tactical sides."
One of the things Fulton is trying to do, he said, 'is to link the age-groups with the way things are done in the national team—the same approach to strength and conditioning, to nutrition, to tactics. That is one way of trying to work around the no leagues problem." The Hockey India League solves some of this problem of a half-built pyramid, but not all, since the league only involves eight elite teams that come together for a brief window, and no junior or grassroots programmes.
If the men's team is struggling in some ways, the women's national team is in deep, deep trouble.
Not only did they get hammered at the Pro League (in both India and Europe legs, managing just two wins in 16 matches and finishing at the bottom), they have been relegated back to the tier-II Nations Cup just two seasons after earning their promotion. Since finishing fourth in thrilling and unexpected fashion at the Tokyo Olympics, the women's team has been on an unchecked downward spiral. They did not qualify for the Paris Olympics, and look now like one of the weakest teams in Asia. Whatever is going wrong with them, despite the presence of some very talented players like captain Salima Tete and Lalremsiami, is deep-rooted. They need attention, resources, and major rebuilding. But in the upside-down world of Indian sport, their lack of international success may mean that they will face total neglect.
Rudraneil Sengupta is the author of The Beast Within, a detective novel set in Delhi. Also Read | 'You can't fight it': Steve Waugh on the rise of T20 cricket Topics You May Be Interested In