n 80 years of Indian Olympic history, Joaquim Carvalho will go down in infamy as the coach under whom the Indian team failed to qualify for the Olympics. In just 11 months of coaching, Carvalho has wiped out 80 years of India's rich Olympic hockey history, with its 18 successive appearances from 1928.

This is like Brazil not qualifying for the World Cup Football. This is like West Indies not qualifying for World Cup Cricket. Every other Indian coach but Carvalho took the Indian hockey team to the Olympics.

What were the reasons for India's failure?

Lack of Preparation

Per IndianHockey.com: "The Champions Trophy was held in December 2007 in Kuala Lumpur. With England playing the Champions Trophy, India had the best opportunity to record the team on the pitch, dissect it, open up the weaknesses and show it to the national team. They chose to sit at home; playing mock matches conjured up by their national coach Joaquim Carvalho.

None of the coaching staff – Carvalho, M. P. Singh, Parmeswaran, M. M. Somaiyya or Mervyn Fernandes – had the time to take a 4-hour flight and just concentrate on one team that they needed to beat. Since their retirement, none of these coaches have watched international hockey except on television. But yet they were given the responsibility of taking India to the Olympics!"

India played just a 5-match series against Belgium - winning 3, losing 1 and drawing 1 - and then a few games against local Australian sides - even there they lost to Western Australia. India did not play against the top six teams, and considered our wins against teams like Bangladesh and Sri Lanka a big thing.

Arrogant Attitude

Per Sundeep Misra of IndianHockey.com: "Arrogance has its own place in sport. It sits well with champions. You can probably believe that Olympic gold medallist and World Cup winner Teun de Nooijer could be arrogant; possibly German coach Bernhard Peters for winning two consecutive World Cups (2002 and 2006), and maybe even the soft-spoken Australian coach Barry Dancer for winning Australia's first ever Olympic gold.

I could never understand the arrogance of Joaquim Carvalho and M. P. Singh. Both these coaches had never won an Olympic or a World Cup medal; neither had any coaching qualifications to speak off. But both walked as if they owned the hockey world."

Poor Team Selection

What exactly is the purpose of the Premier Hockey League, if players who do well in the PHL do not get selected to the Indian team?

Arjun Halappa, Man of the Tournament in the 2008 PHL, was dropped from the Olympic Qualifier team. Sandeep Singh, Top Scorer of the 2008 PHL, was dropped from the Olympic Qualifier team. Star forwards in the 2008 PHL, Gagan Ajeet Singh and Deepak Thakur, were dropped from the Olympic Qualifier team.

Then a God-given opportunity landed, out of an unfortunate injury. Divakar Ram was injured prior to the Qualifier and had to be replaced. Instead of replacing a drag flicker with another drag flicker (Sandeep Singh), the bird-brained coach replaced the drag flicker with a forward.

Joaquim kept Sandeep Singh out of the qualifier squad on the grounds of fitness and indiscipline. Sandeep Singh, strides ahead of Raghunath in the flick department, says his fitness was beyond question before the qualifiers. "I played in the 2007 German league as well as the 2008 PHL with distinction. Fitness was not a problem at all," he informs.

The end result of all this was that India could not score even a single goal in the do-or-die final against Britain. The Indians blew away five penalty-corners in the match.

Bloody Ego

Joaquim's ego was so bloody enormous that he refused super coach and Technical Director Charlesworth's advice. Charlesworth told PTI: "The plan was always for me to accompany the Indian team but I remained stranded in Perth, awaiting a ticket to return to India. I believe the coach did not want me to be involved and I could not convince Mr Gill that it was important."

Let's get one thing straight - Clueless Carvalho is a crybaby in diapers, compared to Charlesworth. As a player and coach, the difference between Carvalho and Charlesworth is like night and day.

Charlesworth played 227 games for Australia in a 16-year career (1972-1988), 132 of these games as the captain of the Australian team. Charlesworth won 1 World Cup (1986) and 3 Champions Trophy titles.

To give but one example, Charlesworth and Carvalho both played in the 1986 World Cup in London. Charlesworth's Australian team (nicknamed Charlie's Angels) won the gold, Charlesworth was the leading goal scorer of the tournament, and was voted as the Player of the Tournament. In the same World Cup, Carvalho's team came LAST - the only time India came last in a World Cup.

As a coach, Carvalho is nothing but a club-level coach in comparison to Charlesworth. Australian women's hockey teams coached by Charlesworth won 2 Olympic gold medals (1996, 2000), 2 World Cup titles (1994, 1998), 4 Champions Trophy titles (1993, 1995, 1997, 1999) and 1 Commonwealth Games gold medal (1998). In contrast, Carvalho has 1 gold medal in a continental tournament (Asia Cup), for which he demanded and got money from all over the country.

Charlesworth put his career record in perspective: "In the past 25 years, I either played for or coached 13 gold medal winning teams at the Olympics, World Cup, Champions Trophy and Commonwealth Games. In that same period, India have only one such gold medal at a world-level tournament (2002 Commonwealth Games women's hockey gold). I know what winning at the elite level is all about."

Why can't Gill and Jyothi accept Charlesworth on pure merit? What is the harm in accepting that we need to learn from others. Globalization works both ways.

Carvalho is not a man of his word, and is not to be trusted. When he took over as the coach in April 2007, he grandly stated that he would quit if he does not deliver results. Indeed, he took the moral high ground by announcing he is stepping down after India's loss. Within 2 days, Carvalho changed his mind, thereby losing all respect.

Anyway, the Indian team's match results in the ill-fated Olympic Qualifier, played at the Prince of Wales Country Club in Santiago, are as follows:

Date	Result	Goal Scorers (India)
Mar 1	India 8 - Russia 0	Dileep Tirkey (14 m) Prabhjyot Singh (19, 29, 65 m) Tushar Khandekar (36 m) Sardara Singh (48 m) V. Ramachandra Raghunath (54 m)
Mar 2	India 7 - Austria 3	Dileep Tirkey (9, 23 m) Ignace Tirkey (42 m) Shivendra Singh (51, 55 m) Bharat Chhikara (53 m) Rajpal Singh (also 53 m)
Mar 4	India 18 - Mexico 1	Rajpal Singh (6 goals) Prabhjyot Singh (4 goals) V. Ramachandra Raghunath (4 goals) Shivendra Singh (2 goals) Tushar Khandekar (1 goal) Sardara Singh (1 goal)
Mar 6	Britain 3 - India 2	V. Ramachandra Raghunath (3, 64 m)
Mar 8	India 4 - Chile 1	Prabhjyot Singh (9 m) V. Ramachandra Raghunath (23, 61 m) Bharat Chhikara (23 m)
Mar 9	Britain 2 - India 0	INDIA OUT OF THE OLYMPICS!

The Indian team was as follows:

Goalkeepers: Bharat Chetri, Baljit Singh.

Defenders: Dilip Tirkey, V R Raghunath, Wiiliam Xalxo, Diwakar Ram.

Midfielders: Gurbaj Singh, Prabodh Tirkey (captain), Bimal Lakra, Sardara Singh, Ignace Tirkey, Vikram Kanth.

Forwards: Rajpal Singh, Prabhjot Singh, Tushar Khandekar, Shivendra Singh, Bharat Chikara, Ajeethesh Rai

Officials: Joaquim Carvalho (chief coach), M. P. Singh (coach), M. Ramesh Parameswsaran (assistant coach), Ganguly Prasad (trainer-SAI, Bangalore), Sreekanth Iyengar (physio), Prasanna (video analyst), Nagaraj (masseur), M. M. Somayya (technical director) and R. K. Shetty (manager)

ne needs to have morals in order to take moral responsibility. The drunkard and the clerk who run Indian hockey have morals of the gutter. It is so sickening to see them desperately clinging to their posts.

The IHF has changed 15 coaches in 14 years. Why can't the officials also be changed?

Where did the IHF go wrong in the Olympic fiasco?

Non-Performance

In the 14 years under Gill's watch, India failed to qualify for the Olympics for the first time, returned medal less from the Asian Games for the first time, and hockey got demoted hockey from the Government's priority list for the first time.

If the IHF were a private company, Gill and Jyothi would either have been fired on account of non-performance, or would have resigned.

In an interview to NDTV India, Gill said: "No other sport in the country has won as many titles (10) as hockey in all age-group tournaments in Asia, since I took over in 1994. Why has no newspaper or television channel bothered to highlight the achievements of the Indian hockey teams at the Asian level?"

Jyothikumaran also toed the party line: "I want to know where our detractors were when India won the 2007 Asia Cup with a stylish performance. Was there a felicitation for us then? Our conscience is clear."

Unfortunately, hockey is an international game, not a continental game. What has Indian hockey been reduced to, for Gill and Jyothi to claim Asian successes as a validation of his tenure? It is like South Africa claiming dominance in Africa, or Argentina claiming dominance in the Americas. It does not mean a thing at the international level.

Indian men's hockey has failed to win any medal whatsover in 14 premier world tournaments - Olympics (3), World Cup (4), Champions Trophy (5) and Commonwealth Games (2) in the 14 years under Gill.

IHF is 0 for 14 in these world tournaments. In response, Gill told PTI: "We do not have an instant coffee machine that you can get results immediately. It takes time to regain your position." (This statement was later denied by Gill).

The IHF was supposed to hold 13 Senior National Hockey Championships in Gill's reign. It ended up holding just 5. The IHF was supposed to hold 13 AGMs. It ended up holding just 6.

No international tournaments are played within India on an annual basis. Discipline among players is appalling. Crude tackling is the norm, as a result of which Indian players get yellow cards. Indian hockey has no set calendar where players know their schedule (domestic and international) at the beginning of the year. Indian hockey players get no match fees, nor monthly salaries per annual contracts.

Says Alok Sinha of The Times of India: "Accountability has always been an alien word in Indian hockey. Our sports officials are thick-skinned people, oblivious to the demands of the modern game, the desire of the fans and ethics of an administration accountable to the tax-payers on whose money the game is run.

Inaction on Charlesworth

Gill's explanation for Charlesworth's no show in Chile was: "Charlesworth did not go to Chile because his contract has not yet been finalised. The moment everything is finalised, his role would be put in black and white."

That's the devil quoting the scriptures. Charlesworth was in India from November 2007. If his contract was not finalised till March 2008, then the IHF has been sleeping all these months. That's all the more reason for Gill and Jyothi to quit.

Charlesworth expressed his frustration in no uncertain terms: "It has been weeks since I have been asking for a ticket back to India. I have traded emails with the Indian authorities as long as my arm. There have been promises but no response. I am keen on shifting my family to India. I had planned for December but nothing happened. I thought it would be in January, but still no luck. Then came February and now it is March. There is so much uncertainty. I expect your country to provide me the ticket. I have already spent a lot of my money, and am not ready to spend any more of my money on it."

Brainless Planning

India played only one match against a top-4 team in all of 2007. Overall, India played only 17 internationals in 2007? That is simply not enough when preparing for a do-or-die qualifier.

The British team arrived in Chile 2 weeks before the Qualifier and acclimatised themselves. The Indian team arrived 2 days before the tournament. What kind of foolishness is this?

Treating Players Like Dirt

Gill's long term in office has been marked more by power struggles against players rather than a powerful vision to make hockey a popular, successful and viable sport. Pargat Singh, Jagbeer Singh, Dhanraj Pillai, Ashish Ballal, Viren Rasquinha — to name only five major players — lead a long enough list to suggest that the problem could be with Gill.

In 1998, India won the Asian Games hockey competition. As a reward, Gill fired coach Kaushik and 6 players, including Pillai.

CPI MP Gurudas Dasgupta said what millions of Indian hockey fans feel: "It's a matter of shame that we could not qualify for the Olympics. I know that there have been a number of complaints against K. P. S. Gill. I want him to be thrown out."

Negi added: "This man (Gill) can barely walk and has difficulty in vision. It's time we end his reign." Amen.

hat exactly was the job being done by the then Union Sports Minister Mani Shankar Aiyar? All he did was to talk in generic terms like a clerk.

When asked about the Olympic fiasco, Aiyar shirked off all responsibility stating: "I cannot do anything about it since the IHF is an autonomous body. K. P. S. Gill and Jyothikumaran, as its president and secretary, should answer for the debacle. We don't appoint a Federation President so we cannot remove him as well. We just watch and suffer."

There were lots of things Aiyar could have done. For starters, when Uma Bharti was the sports minister in 2003, there was a proposal to fix the tenures of federation office bearers at eight years (two terms). That clause has been kept in abeyance and the file is gathering dust in Shastri Bhavan.

As a result, we have V. K. Malhotra heading the Archery Federation for the last 36 YEARS, Priya Ranjan Das Munshi heading the Football Federation for the last 20 years, Suresh Kalmadi heading the Athletics Federation for the last 19 years, K. P. S. Gill heading the Hockey Federation for the last 14 years, and V. K. Verma heading the Badminton Federation for the last 10 years.

Irrespective of failures, heads of federations manage to retain their office. There is total lack of accountability. All Aiyar had to do was to enforce the 2-term limit, and it would have revolutionised Indian sports administration.

What it finds difficult to swallow is Sports Minister Mani Shankar Aiyar turning out to be the most unlikely protector of the likes of Gill. When a dozen Olympians met him last year after a protest march, instead of initiating action, Aiyar lectured them on how one of them could contest the IHF election.

Aiyar said he would not even demand any explanation from the IHF on the Olympic Qualifier loss. In typical bureaucratic language, Aiyar said, "I won't be making any such demand but as far as Parliament questions are concerned, they will be recorded and forwarded to the IHF. I cannot, as a minister, keep giving advise for every single discipline. It is the work of experts."

History will record that Indian hockey died under Mani Shankar Aiyar's watch. Retribution was swift. In less than a month of the Olympic debacle, Aiyar was removed as the Union Sports Minister by the Prime Minister.

Even a headless chicken would have done a better job than Aiyar.

s per FIH rankings, Indian men's hockey is 9th in the world. So, why is India not present in the Beijing Olympics field of 12?

The answer is easy - FIH came up with a crazy and cut throat qualification scheme that had 3 winners from 3 separate tournaments go to the Olympics. In the olden days, the Olympic Qualifier was one tournament for all teams. There was room for a bad day or two, with multiple spots available for grabs.

Still, the above Olympic Qualifer scheme does not make the FIH Eurocentric. The unpardonable offence committed by the FIH was to make the 7-nation Champions Trophy into an 8-nation event, and let England be the 8th nation. In any other year, it would have been wrong. But in the Olympic year, it was a crime.

Because of the timing of this year's CT, so close to the Olympic Qualifier, the FIH should have let the 2007 Champions Trophy be a 7-nation tournament. Picking any one of the teams ranked 7-10 (Argentina, India, England, New Zealand) would be unfair to least one other team still aiming to qualify for the Olympics. None of these 4 countries were in the 2007 CT to begin with, and it would not have made a difference to them.

As a result of FIH's favouritism, England gained invaluable match practice (7 pool matches plus the classification match) against the world's top teams prior to their Olympic Qualifier.

It is not clear why Champions Trophy fixtures are easier with 8 teams and not 7 teams, especially since there are no 5-8 playoffs (as in the Olympics and World Cup).

On another note, during the Santiago Qualifer, tournament officials visited the Indian team hotel around 11 pm. The players were fast asleep, but Shivendra, Vickram and Gurbaj Singh were summoned to the lobby, were orally told and then handed a letter warning them of a “harsher penalty” should they repeat their misdemeanor on the field.

If the FIH treats Indians like dirt, India will reply back in kind. If the FIH doesn't want the World Cup to come to India, to hell with it. Money talks. We will make sure that no Indian money will ever fill the coffers of Eurocentric FIH.

ack in October 1998, Sita Gossein was the Player of the Tournament in the 49th Women's National Hockey Championships in Chennai. Sita was awarded a CYCLE.

Fast forward to September 2003. India had won the Asia Cup in hockey, for the first time ever. Star forward Gagan Ajeet Singh was rewarded by his state government with a SCOOTER.

And in the 2007 Twenty20 World Cup in cricket, Yuvraj Singh got a PORSCHE as a gift from a BCCI office bearer for scoring 6 sixers in an over.

The above sequence of awards shows the acute imbalance in Indian sports. Pankaj Advani summarised it best for all Indian sportspersons - he meant this for governments, but the spirit of it applies to sponsors as well:

"What does a sportsperson need to achieve in order to be recognised? If the answer is a world title, I have it; if it means winning an Asian Games gold medal, I have it; if it means winning the highest sports award in the country, I have it. These people (government bureaucrats) need to get their priorities right. Someone has to tell them that winning the World Championship should be treated at par across sport."

The Indian sports media talks about non-men's-international-cricketing sports once every four years when the Olympics come, and then consign them to the dustbin for the next 4 years. According to Indian media:

• Only foreigners play sports
• Indians play only cricket

60 years after India's independence, Indian media has a slavish mentality that worships anything that is foreign (and mostly white). The way Indian sports writing operates (the best example being Chennai-based Sportstar), one would feel that the articles are being published out of London or Sydney or New York, given their fawning, worshipful and obsequious articles on foreign sportspersons.

Photograph courtesy Stick2Hockey.com

he Photograph of the Month for April 2008 shows the public backlash againt IHF president K. P. S. Gill in Delhi. Under Gill's death watch, India wiped away 80 years of Olympic history by failing to qualify the Beijing Olympics men's hockey competition.

Some of the slogans raised against Gill (as seen in the above photograph) were:

Gill - Your Result is Nill
Gill - Hockey ko na Kill
Remove Gill - Save Hockey

he Indian women's hockey player have not been getting their monthly stipends (ranging from Rs. 4,000 to Rs. 15,000) for the last 10 months!

A senior player told The Indian Express: "I haven't received any money since July 2007. Even yesterday, I went to the bank to see if any money had finally come in but there was nothing from the federation". The player requested anonymity for fear of reprisal action from the federation (IWHF).

IWHF Secretary Ms. Amrit Bose partially confirmed the above report. When contacted by The Indian Express, she said: "All payment have been suspended for the last 4 months only. We were not able to pay the players for the last four months because the money was not given by the sponsors."

When the sponsors (City Limouzines) were contacted by The Indian Express, they denied withholding any payments to the IWHF. Said Deepak Pathak, the Delhi representative for City Limouzines: "We have paid the money. We have all the records."

When the Indian women's coach, M. K. Kaushik was contacted by The Indian Express, he neither confirmed nor denied the payment issue. Said Kaushik: "This is not the right time to talk about money. The team is preparing for the Olympics and we need to focus on that. We can discuss these off-field issues after the qualifying tournament is over."

For the record, the IWHF entered into a 4-year, Rs. 4-crore sponsorship contract with City Limouzines (India) Pvt. Ltd., a Mumbai-based company that rents out luxury cars. Of the Rs. 1 crore per year, Rs. 50 lakhs was to be given to the IWHF for development of the game, while the remaining Rs. 50 lakhs per year was to be paid as salary to the players and coaches. The IWHF had short-listed 40 players, who were to be paid between Rs. 4,000 and Rs. 15,000 per month on a graded system.

n Indian Film Festival was held from April 2-5 in Kuwait. The festival was organised by the Indian Embassy in Kuwait, as a medium to expand people-to-people contacts of the two countries.

The festival was inaugurated by the Kuwaiti Minister of Information, Sheikh Sabah Khaled Al-Hamad Al-Sabah, and the inaugural movie of the film festival was the hockey-themed Chak De India.

Five actresses from Chak De India visited Kuwait and took part in the inaugural ceremony. Actresses Vidya Malavade, Shilpa Shukla, Chitrashi Rawat, Arya Menon and Shubhi Mehta lit the traditional lamp and were presented with a Kuwaiti Dhow at the inaugural ceremony. They later spoke on their experiences while shooting for the Shah Rukh Khan starrer, and also interacted with students from the local Indian schools.

Jazeera Airways sponsored the round-trip of the five Indian actresses.

Dr. Shankar Kumar Chatterjee from Kolkata is this edition's Visitor of the Month. Dr. Chatterjee wrote the following to BharatiyaHockey.org:

The players and the coach are not to be blamed for the national disaster of failing to qualify for the Olympics. Each and every one of us Indians have failed the team. We have neglected the game that has given us 9 world titles. What more success is necessary to prove your worth?

Our hockey players have given us far more than our cricketers have. In return, we have betrayed them and stabbed them in their backs. Blinded by the money in cricket, we have starved the game of hockey to death. Is it not a shame that we do not recognise Leslie Claudius and Ashok Kumar, but go ga ga over Sourav and Sachin?

Money is necessary, but it is not a substitute for a burning desire to succeed. Marketing alone is not enough. Let us struggle and work hard. Money will follow.

Let every Indian with a conscience vow to do whatever he or she can for hockey. Not all of us can influence national policy decisions, niether can we bring money into hockey, but we can teach our kids the game.

I am teaching my only child, a daughter aged nine, the game of hockey. I have brought in other children into it. I am forming a small hockey club for youngsters. I appeal to all of you who read this message to do the same. I vow to continue this to the last day of my life. Let us promise we will not let the game die in the land of the great Dhyan Chand.

Statistics by B. G. Joshi

ockey is the national game of India, but don't forget that hockey is actually an international game played in all continents of the world.

At the international level, Indian men's and women's hockey have an almost negligible impact in terms of winning tournaments, as seen from the table below

Category	Tournament	Men's Champion	India (men)	Womens' Champion	India (women)
World-level	Olympics	Australia (2004)	7th	Germany	Did not Qualify
	World Cup	Germany (2006)	11th	Netherlands	11th
	Champions Trophy	Germany (2007)	Did not Qualify	Netherlands (2007)	Did not Qualify
	Champions Challenge	Argentina (2007)	3rd	China	Did not Qualify
Continental-level	Commonwealth Games	Australia (2006)	6th	Australia (2006)	2nd
	Asian Games	South Korea (2006)	5th	China (2006)	3rd
	Asia Cup	India (2007)	1st	Japan (2007)	4th
	South Asian Federation Games	Pakistan (2006)	2nd	-	-
Junior-level	Junior World Cup	Argentina (2005)	4th	South Korea	11th

Why is there so much resistance to the idea of a foreign coach? What exactly have Indian coaches achieved in the last 25 YEARS of futility? As an example, let's examine the record of the last 5 Indian men's hockey coaches:

2008 - Olympic Qualifier - Joaquim Carvalho - India failed to qualify for the Olympics, for the first time in 80 YEARS

2007 - Champions Challenge - M. P. Singh (penalty corners coach) - In the must-win match against Argentina, India got 11 penalty corners, converted 0, and lost the match and a place in the final. M. P. Singh used to convert penalty corners for India about 2 decades ago, but that was when the term drag flick was not even coined. His penalty corner methodology was aptly described by Stick2Hockey.com - put a chair on the turf, sit relaxed, and ask the boys to hit 400-500 times! And yell, "Maar, maar, sale jhamke maar".

2006 - Asian Games - V. Bhaskaran - India returned medal less from the Asian Games hockey, for the first time in 48 YEARS. Under Bhaskaran, an Indian men's hockey team lost to China for the first time ever.

2006 - Commonwealth Games - Rajinder Singh Jr. - India finished 6th out of 10 countries in the Commonwealth Games, just ahead of Trinidad & Tobago, Scotland, Canada and South Africa. Pathetic!

2005 - Junior World Cup - Harendra Singh - Defending champion India returned medal less from the Junior World Cup.