Indian Hockey's Various Turf Dilemmas

From ending up with a wooden spoon to where? is the question bothering lovers and well wishers of hockey in India 

By Francis Adams

Picture courtesy: Reuters

  The cradle of hockey in India, Punjab, seem to have taken the onus upon itself to resurrect the country's performance in the sport after Team India failed to qualify for the Beijing Games and then were hit equally 

harder when they finished last at London 2012.
  Punjab state's deputy chief minister Sukhbir Singh Badal, also the state's sports minister has said that the Punjab government has laid out a Rs 418-crore plan aimed at upgrading infrastructure and nurturing talent
from the grassroot.
  He said that Punjab has already constructed seven hockey stadiums, with another seven more to be added in three years. All these stadiums, he added, will have the blue turf with pink surround that was used at London 2012, a turf that the Indian team had problems playing on.
  Unfortunately, the country's sports ministry has not revealed any plan on the revival of hockey. Instead, the ministry has said in response to a Right To Information plea from a 10-year-old school kid that hockey is not
India's national sport.
  Then there is the ongoing tussle between two hockey bodies, the Indian Hockey Federation and Hockey India to contend with before we realize Rio 2016 is upon us.
  Hockey lovers in the country who keep themselves updated on the development of the sport at the global level may shudder at the lack of awakening at the country's sports ministry as well as Punjab's prudent, yet hasty approach in laying out the blue turf at all the stadiums it is building.
  The blue turf and the yellow ball were introduced at London 2012 and at other venues worldwide by the FIH, the sport's international body, apparently, to make the game easier to watch for spectators. Wasn't the
green turf and white ball easier to watch?
  Australia's star Mark Knowles has said he loves the blue turf because it makes the sport stand out from other sports played on green pitches.

  So was it that the choice of the blue turf was done based on its aesthetic appeal more than on playing performance? You would believe so if you believe in India's Australian coach Michael Nobbs, whose coaching assignment with India runs until 2016. Nobbs has slammed the blue turf saying he had no idea why was the turf introduced at the Olympics. 

 Along with the current Australia team coach Ric Charlesworth, Nobbs said the turf was uneven, slow and bouncy. He assessed that most teams had difficulty converting their penalty corners on the blue turf and that a turf's characteristic varies according to prevailing climatic conditions.
 Incidentally, the blue turf's manufacturer and supplier, Sports Technology International is also Australian. It has named the product Polygras Olympia.

 Could there be a possibility then that the FIH could introduce a different, upgraded pitch at Rio 2016?
 It could be, considering the fact that the FIH only announced in March 2011 that the new Olympic hockey turf at London 2012 will be blue in colour.
 And although Polgras Olympia claims its turf has water saving technology, a criteria that FIH has been seeking, the world body is now rooting for a water-free synthetic turf. According to the FIH "Developing a water-free turf for top level hockey is an important project because it recognizes environmental concerns about water usage."
  It has said that it is constantly updating the status of this new water-free surface with the turf industry and specialist advisers, including its accredited laboratories. "Specific research has also been
commissioned to enable us to specify a water-free turf which performs in much the same way as current water-based turf," the FIH has said, adding that it may take a year or two before the new turf is widely available.
 So, does it mean that in the next two years from now, the 14 blue turfs that the Punjab government has planned to lay out at its stadiums will be obsolete? And does it not mean that in another two years more money will be needed as investment to replace the blue turfs?
 Ardent followers of the sport in India will remember, vividly, that it was the shift from natural turf to astroturf in the late 70s that first signalled India's decline in hockey, that is, besides the political tussle between the south and north lobbies within the Indian hockey federation that triggered the slide.
 Clearly, authorities controlling the sport in India will be compelled to cast their differences and inaction aside and form a cohesive unit if the country wishes to be among the medal winners in hockey, because, like Sukhbir Singh Badal has said: "We have to understand that competition in every game has become very intense and players will have to move two steps ahead of every country to survive."
  Unfortunately, India despite holding the honour of being the only team to have won gold at eight consecutive Olympic Games in hockey, has never been among those who carried out scientific research on the subject of field hockey.
 According to Tomasz Podgórski1 and Maciej Pawlak, from the Department of Physiology, Biochemistry and Hygiene, University School of Physical Education, Poznań, Poland and authors of "A Half Century of Scientific Research in Field Hockey", the sport saw 208 scientific studies published in 50 years (1960 to 2010) covering the fields of biochemistry, physiology, sport injuries, psychology and tactics. The authors discovered that more than 60 percent of these studies originated from five native English-speaking countries: UK, USA, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
 Should people running the sport in India fail to wake up now we may have to follow what Sanjay Kohli of hockey equipment manufacturing company Rakshak told the media after India's debacle at London 2012. He said, "For the past three days we have shut our eyes and ears as people pass comments on us. Now we have started saying that we don’t manufacture only hockey items."