The Indian team at the start of one of its FIH World Cup matches
One of the spin-offs in a career in which writing and commenting on cricket seems to have taken precedence – despite having been to Olympic Games, Asian Games, SAF Games and numerous other non cricket sporting events – is that I have not been in touch with a whole generation of Indian hockey players.
A quirk of fate offered me a chance to make some headway in that direction when I got to spend some quality time with some players last week. In fact, I got to chat up with a couple of them from the Indian squad that took the field in the Hero Honda FIH World Cup on a 15-minute drive and we were able to exchange notes on a number of contemporary issues facing Indian hockey.
One of the pet peeves of the contemporary player is that their predecessors keep insisting that they do not work as hard as they did in their time. “I believe that if we had played in their era, we could have played three matches in a day. Such was the pace at which hockey was played then,” one of the players told me.
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