Courtesy Manoj Prasad of The Indian Express

f you ever wondered why there is no Indian women's hockey team in the Sydney Olympics, look no further than the Bihar Centre for Women's Hockey in Ranchi.

Established in 1976 to identify and groom potential national-level women hockey players, this hockey centre is a symbol of everything that is wrong in Indian hockey.

For 25 women, barely into their teens, life at the hockey centre is a nightmare. The young players are lodged in stinking, leaking, mosquito-infested rooms, fed on meagre rations, and compelled to share beds due to lack of cots.

The kitchen is a breeding ground for flies, mosquitoes, cockroaches and snails. The utensils used to cook food are covered in a thick coat of carbon. And the centre's four toilets, all of which have doors missing, stink.

All the 25 inmates fled the centre last month. The desperate authorities managed to persuade 20 of them to return, though none of them has come back convinced. 

The bankrupt Bihar government, which allocates a mere Rs. 650 per inmate per month, couldn't release even that during the last fiscal year (1999-2000). The reason for the non-release of the funds is shocking. "We had no money to pay bribe to the babus there, hence no money was allocated to us for this year,'' says an accountant of the hockey centre.

Former India vice-captain Savitri Purti, once a resident of the centre, directs her ire at corporate offices. "Anywhere else, e.g., in Korea or Australia, the expenses for food, lodging and clothing of the potential hockey players of their countries are sponsored by corporate bodies. In our country, there are no sponsors for sports other than cricket, and a fund-starved state government like Bihar cannot do much.''

Despite all the hardships the players endure, the centre has produced 2 India vice-captains and half-a-dozen internationals in its almost quarter century of existence. Pushpa Pradhan, Masira Surin, Edlin Kerketta and Anita Ekka, who participated in the junior national women hockey coaching camp at Chennai this month, are current inmates of the centre.

While the rest of their compatriots will be playing for Olympic glory in Sydney, the players lodged in the Bihar Centre for Women's Hockey will be struggling for basic amenities like food and lodging.

As one of the inmates, who would remain anonymous said, "It is better to live on the streets than lead a life of hell here.''

he 16-member Indian hockey team was selected at the Olympic training camp at Murwillumbah, near Brisbane. IHF president K. P. S. Gill announced the team after a selection committee meeting comprising Gill, manager K. Jyotikumaran and coach Vasudevan Baskaran. The members are:

Goalkeepers : Jude Menezes and Devesh Chauhan

Full-Backs : Dileep Tirkey, Dinesh Nayak and Lazarus Barla

Half-Backs : Baljit Singh Saini, Sukhbir Singh Gill, Mohammed Riaz, Thirumal Valavan and Ramandeep Singh (captain)

Forwards : Mukesh Kumar, Dhanraj Pillai, Baljit Singh Dhillon, Sameer Dad, Deepak Thakur and Gagan Ajit Singh

Officials : Coach: V. Bhaskaran, Assistant Coach: Harendra Singh, Manager: Mr. K. Jyothikumaran, Doctor: Dr. P. K. Ramesh.

The six who have been dropped from the squad are Edward Aloysious, Len Ayyappa, Arjun Halappa, Jagan Senthil, Bimal Lakra and Prabjot Singh. These six players will stay on in Australia through the course of the Olympic tournament.

Excerpts from an interview of V. Bhaskaran
Taken by S. Mageswaran of The Indian Express

hat is your assessment of each team in our group? 

Bhaskaran : "We have played all of them before with varied performances, and with varied results. Everything depends on minimising mistakes. 

ARGENTINA (Sep 17): This is the most important match in our schedule. This is our first match and they have surprised us in crucial matches on earlier occasions. They adopt football-like tactics, but with minimum mistakes, we can start on a winning note. A win here would be a morale-booster. 

AUSTRALIA (Sep 19): The strongest team in our group. On home turf, they are the hot favourites. India has played Australia often, and thus we are aware of each other's strengths and weaknesses. We have a couple of surprises for them, though. 

SOUTH KOREA (Sep 21): We beat them in the Asian Games. We lost narrowly at the World Cup and Asia Cup. Quick passing and swift counter attacks are the Koreans' forte. Our boys have been trained to counter the Korean flair. 

SPAIN (Sep 23): We played them last in January (India lost 3-5). We had just begun our preparations and they were a full side then. Their style is a casual one. But they commit very few mistakes. We should not get frustrated if we don't get goals. We should have patience. 

POLAND (Sep 26): I am not taking them lightly. They have had a couple of good results in the qualifiers (at Osaka). They have come through the hard way. I don't expect the Poles to attack. We should get some early goals and build on them."

n a rare partnership between two sworn enemies, India's Olympic hockey team will play with Pakistani-made hockey sticks at the Sydney Olympics.

The Indians will discard their traditional wooden equipment made by stick manufacturers in Jalandhar, to play with the one-piece graphite sticks made in the northern Pakistani town of Sialkot.

Each member of the Indian hockey team will carry a graphite stick to Sydney, besides a few wooden ones to be used mainly for practice.

Due to tight finances, the Indians players are using the "B-grade" graphite stick, the inferior of the two brands available in the market. A "B-grade" stick costs around Rs. 6,500 while the price of an "A-grade" stick is around Rs. 8,000.

The grip and the feel, two important aspects of choosing a stick, have appealed to the players. "It has the power and is not heavy," said midfielder Mohammed Riaz, who led India on the tour of South Africa last year. "But if you get hit on the body, it will hurt badly." 

Another advantage of the graphite stick is that it lasts much longer than the wooden one. "If used properly, it can last up to five years," said Mukesh Kumar.

Article courtesy Rohit Brijnath of Rediff

n a land whose sporting history would fit into a thin book, he remains a quiet, dignified reminder of the truly heroic.

In a land of 1 billion people, where a single Olympic medal of any hue in Sydney would send us into paroxysms of delight, the somber man will never tell you that he has four. Gold in 1948, gold in 1952, gold in 1956, and silver in 1960. 

The London Times wrote of him once, "Hockey is not worth seeing if he is not playing".

Leslie Claudius, the saint of the right-halves, was, and is, a man amongst men. 

Claudius haunts me. Not because Sydney beckons and we're back to genuflecting in front of our personal Gods and praying desperately for a medal. It is more because we live in strange times, when sport has been stained by corruption, when possessing a hefty bank balance is the preferred virtue to sweating in the morning.

It is a time of excess, when humility is a weakness, when rewards are never personal and fulfilling, but arrive in the form of a sponsor, when men use statistics to glorify individual achievements.

I yearn for a simpler time, when a country boy named Claudius, from a small Railway Colony in Bilaspur, bent his back every evening over a stick till he eventually ruled the world.

And this is how it happened.

In the days of the Bengal-Nagpur Railways (BNR), Kharagpur was quite a hockey centre, so big that they had two teams for the Beighton Cup. One day, Claudius was watching from the sidelines fellow Anglo Indians Dickie Carr, Joe Galibardy and Carl Tapsall, each one an Olympic gold medallist. 

Carr came up to Claudius and barked, "YOUNG 'UN, YOU WANT TO PLAY?" Claudius, not believing his luck, said "Yessir, yessir." They had to saw 3" off his stick as he was so short.

Every day Claudius came for practice, and every day the Olympians showed him their techniques, and every day when they were all gone, he stayed back at the practice ground, alone for 4 hours, bringing his technique to perfection. In 15 days, Claudius was in the first team.

This embrace of the work ethic became the Claudius signature. If he was impressed by Keshav Dutt's body swerve, he would not just politely applaud, he would practice it, hour after hour, till he could do it as well.

Once, he so bemused the legendary K. D. Singh 'Babu' with his tackles that Babu told him, "Tu bahut chalu hain, how come you stop me everytime."

In his prime, spanning a period of 4 Olympics from 1948-1960, Leslie Claudius owned the right-half position in Indian hockey.

Photograph Courtesy : Wills Book of Excellence

n August 31, India's best known right-in, Joginder Singh 'Gindi', retired from South-Eastern Railway after 36 years of distinguished service. 

Two days before, on the occasion of National Sports Day, a benefit match was played between Railways XI and Army XI at Delhi. The match was organised by the Jawaharlal Nehru Hockey Tournament Society on August 29, which is the birth anniversary of hockey wizard Dhyan Chand. Earlier, the statue of Dhyan Chand was garlanded in the premises.

A handsome purse of Rs 6.5 lakh was presented by Union Sports Minister Sukhdev Singh Dhindsa to the ailing Olympian. Sixty-year old Joginder Singh, who suffers from kidney failure, is undergoing dialysis thrice a day, seven days a week, while awaiting a kidney transplant.

Joginder first made his mark playing for Delhi Schools in the national schools championships from 1954 to 56. He then played for Khalsa Blues in the local league, and for Delhi in the Nationals until 1959.

Joginder was part of the Indian  team that won silver at the 1960 Rome Olympics, silver at the 1962 Jakarta Asian Games, and gold at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. After the Tokyo gold-medal winning effort, the dazzling right winger was named the finest hockey player of the world by the English press. Joginder played for India between 1959 and 1967.

Paying Joginder a tribute at the presentation ceremony, former president of the Indian Hockey Federation, Ashwini Kumar, recalled the 1964 Olympic final against Pakistan where Gindi repeatedly tore through the rival defence.

"Joginder was unstoppable. The rival full-backs used all methods to stop him. They tried to obstruct him, then resorted to pulling his shirt and crowding but to no avail."

Joginder, whose stickwork is still folklore among his contemporaries, says, "I still remember how an unfortunate bounce of the ball cost us the gold in Rome. Now artificial turf is the truest surface. I find no reason why our ball skills should decline. Why should we falter in stopping dead a push during a penalty corner?"

Joginder regrets the lack of competition in the present-day Indian hockey. "For the 1960 Rome Olympics, we had seven right outs. Everyone of them deserved a place in the final eleven. No one was inferior to the other. The difference in class was wafer-thin. So we were always trying to upgrade ourselves, to outdo the other," recalls Joginder.

On the fall in standards of Indian hockey over the years, Joginder said, "There is virtually no hockey left in our schools and therein lies the cause of India's decline. How many schools have qualified coaches?"

Modesty is a way of life with Joginder. He has no regrets. "I am happy with what I have got. I served my country as best as I could, and I think I did a good job."

For the Indian hockey contingent, his message is, "I wish the boys all the luck. Put an end to wasted chances. It really makes the country proud when the national anthem is played during the award-giving ceremony at the Olympic Games." 

Magazine courtesy Uli Meyer and Ewald Gehrmann

he July issue of Deutsche Hockey Zeitung featured an article on Dhanraj Pillai. It was titled, "Das wird mir in Sydney sehr helfen," with the byline "Fur Indiens, Dhanraj Pillai war das Kapitel Bundesliga eine Lehrstunde - und eine Hilfe fur das olympische Turnier 2000."

The photographs caption was "Dhanraj Pillai im Trikot der indischen National-mannschaft und des Bundesligisten HTC Stuttgarter Kickers."

We are waiting for the German to English translation of the above text on Dhanraj Pillai aka Boris Becker aus Bombay.

Article by A. Joseph Anthony of The Hindu

t all started with a water balloon thrown on a women's hockey team member by a compatriot from the men's team. This was during the 1998 Commonwealth Games at Kuala Lumpur.

The (unintended) target was Nidhi Khullar, who was out of her room hanging some wet clothes to dry. Her fury fell on Mukesh Kumar, who just happened to be looking out from his 12th floor room in the Commonwealth Games village. 

Nidhi called Mukesh 'uncouth.' Mukesh responded with a rare display of aggression. When light dawned on Khullar as to the true villains of the piece (Tirkey and Subbaiah), she sought to mend fences with Mukesh. 

The persistence of the Indian women's team's outside-right paid off one evening, after the teams had dinner, followed by a cultural programme at the Commonwealth Games village. Mukesh relented when he saw she was truly apologetic. The balcony-to-balcony chats bridged the 'divide' and they became good friends once again. 

Shortly after the Commonwealth Games came the Asian Games at Bangkok. Subbaiah shared Mukesh's room and Mary Stella, Nidhi's. The roommates rose to the role of match-makers, but despite their best efforts, not much headway was made. 

When the relationship became known to coach Kaushik, who accompanied Nidhi's parents on pilgrimages to Vaishnodevi almost every year, he pledged to do the needful for Mukesh. True to his word, Kaushik won over the parents. In Nidhi's traditional family circle of Punjabi origin, the green signal from relatives was also required. 

Then the STD phone calls began between Hyderabad, Mukesh's hometown, and Gorakhpur, Nidhi's native place. For the 15-day period of courtship, Mukesh ran up a phone bill of Rs. 27,000, and Nidhi, Rs. 9000. 

D-day finally arrived on January 24, 1999. Friends from the hockey fraternity - both men and women - were in attendance at the wedding. Festivities included hiding the bridegroom's shoes in exchange for which the bride's sisters demanded Rs. 5000. 

A reception followed in Hyderabad. Turning up to greet the couple were K. Vijaya Rama Rao, former Director of the CBI, T. Jesudanam and H. J. Dora, Vice Presidents of the Indian Hockey Federation, and many players.

What started as a water balloon fight finally turned into a marriage! Mukesh Kumar, the first sportsperson from Andhra Pradesh to be a triple Olympian, had finally met his match.

4-Nation tournament was held at Poznan, Poland, to help prepare the Polish team for the Sydney Olympics. India sent its junior team to the tournament, which featured hosts Poland, Egypt and Belgium.

In their opening encounter on August 17, India went down to Poland 1-2 despite leading 1-0 at the break. They fared better in their second match, ousting Egypt 3-1.

Belgium were beaten 2-0 by the young Indian bunch in the subsequent encounter, which gave India a berth in the final.

Poland proved a tough task in the title round, and India went down 1-3 in the final.

The Indian team was accompanied by assistant coach and trainer Saju Joseph.

he 32nd Junior National Championships (women) was held at the Mayor Radhakrishnan Stadium in Chennai from August 24 - August 31. The federation issued a directive that junior players who had also played in the previous Senior Nationals would not eligible for the junior championships.

The quarter-final lineup was as follows: Tamil Nadu (Pool A), Orissa (Pool B), Punjab (Pool C), Karnataka (Pool D), Chandigarh (Pool E), Bihar (Pool F), Uttar Pradesh (Pool G) and Kerala (Pool H).

Bihar entered the quarter-finals without playing any match. This was because they got two back-to-back walkovers when both Rajasthan and Vidharbha did not show up.

The following were the results in the knockout stages:

Stage	Results
Quarter-Finals	Orissa beat Punjab 2-0 Bihar beat Kerala 6-0 Uttar Pradesh beat Chandigarh 3-2 Karnataka beat Tamil Nadu
Semi-Finals (August 30)	Orissa beat Karnataka 3-1 Bihar beat Uttar Pradesh 6-1
FINAL (August 31)	Orissa beat Bihar 3-2 (Tie-breaker)

Regulation time and 15 minutes of extra-time failed to resolve the goalless deadlock in the keenly fought final. In the tie-breaker, Mukta Praba Barla, skipper Sarita Ekka and Sunita Ekka scored for Orissa, while only Guddi Kumaria and Fulmani Soy succeeded for Bihar. Most of the Orissa players are from the Sports Authority of India, Rourkela Centre.

For the third place, Karnataka edged out Uttar Pradesh 4-3, on the strengths of Sindhu Koppa's hat-trick and skipper Kumari's match winner.

lashback to the Utrecht World Cup in 1998. Captain Dhanraj Pillai was visibly unfit, yet the team doctor, team management and Dhanraj collaborated to make sure he made the Indian team. The result was a disastrous World Cup for India, which eventually finished 9th.

Fast forward to year 2000, the year of the Sydney Olympics.

After a 6-week battle to overcome a back injury, Sue Chandler, the Great Britain captain, admitted defeat and withdrew from the Olympic squad. She was replaced by Mandy Nicholson, while Pauline Stott, of Scotland, took over the captaincy.

"I've done all I can to be fit but I'm not, and I needed to make a decision," Chandler said. "It was dragging on and it wasn't fair on Mandy or Pauline."

he abduction of matinee idol Rajkumar by sandalwood smuggler Veerappan in Bangalore had a trickle-down effect on the Indian hockey team's preparations for the Sydney Olympics. 

Security was strengthened at the KSCA Stadium clubhouse in Bangalore where the Indian hockey team was staying. The Olympic camp ended 2 days earlier, on August 2, instead of August 4. The two-day selection trial to pick the 22 probables was cancelled.

The players dispersed to their respective locations across the country, even as riots broke out in Bangalore. IHF secretary K. Jyothikumaran failed to reach Bangalore in time as transport links were cut off.

After a week's breather, a rescheduled training programme brought the probables to Delhi on August 10, ahead of schedule. The nation's capital does not have a good turf, so the players had to use a lot of caution while practising on a tattered and uneven turf.

The stress, therefore, was on physical conditioning, interrupted by visits to the official draper to give uniform measurements.

Regular training commenced only when the Indian team reassembled in Brisbane, Australia, which is where the final 16 got selected.