Hockey: Only the beginning for India's youthful renaissance

India finished second in the Asia Cup in August and the juniors won the Sultan Johor tournament

This new-look team performed really well at the recent Asia Cup at Ipoh, Malaysia. They were rather unlucky to not emerge from the tournament as winners after a thrilling final where they finished on the wrong end of a 4-3 score-line due to a few controversial calls by the referees.

Even before that tourney in Malaysia, the talent at the coach’s disposal shone through at the Champions Trophy late last year, where India finished a very creditable fourth after losing the bronze medal playoff to Pakistan.

For a team that was just being introduced to the demands of international hockey at one of the most prestigious tournaments around, that was a very promising showing.

Since then, Indian hockey has been on the upswing and both the senior and junior teams’ performances have helped tide over the catastrophe that was last year’s Olympics.

And what’s good to see is that the talent pool available to pick from is not limited.

“As I have said, the future of hockey in India is juniors. With the loss of the WSH players to the main hockey system for the last 16 months, India had to develop the junior programme,” former coach Nobbs mentioned in an interview post the junior team’s victory.

“This group of juniors [playing the Sultan of Johor Cup] are a great bunch coached extremely well by Baljit Saini and Gregg Clark, who should really be looked at for the national coaching job as they have been intimately involved with these players for the last two years,” Nobbs added.

“After the Junior World Cup, most of these players will move into the senior team and will have had considerable experience already playing senior hockey, and we will start to see more consistent results for the senior Indian team.”

Of the players who featured in the triumph at Malaysia, Manpreet Singh the captain, has already featured for India at the senior level. So have the likes of Mandeep Singh, Gurmail Singh, Amit Rohidas, Malak Singh and Ramandeep Singh.

In short, the results that we have seen over the last 10 months or so promise much towards the restoration of Indian hockey’s standards on the world stage.

But, we have been here before.

Senior teams’ inability to perform leading to changes being rung that brought juniors into the fold has been seen in the past as well. The likes of Sandeep Singh, Sardara Singh, Arjun Halappa, Tushar Khandekar, S.V. Sunil and Shivendra Singh all came into the side as youngsters.

At the time that they made their entry into the fold, they were touted to be the flag-bearers of a brighter future for the team. True enough, they went on to become mainstays of the team at the senior level, but did that necessarily make the team better at a relative level to the other teams?

This wave of positive vibrancy has come before.

Teams such as New Zealand, Britain, Belgium and Korea in the meantime did not necessarily match India in terms of talented superstars, but found a way of developing winning teams. And this helped them stay competitive in the world helping them climb above traditional powers like India and Pakistan in the rankings.

Over the years, India’s ranking has slipped from being a top 6 nation, to top 10 nation to dropping to their lowest ever of 12th last year before climbing back to be ranked 11th this year.

So while the new approach has had a winning start, the road only promises to get more challenging from here on in. And it would be a welcome break from tradition if this current crop of youngsters coming through the system does indeed go on to buck the trend and catapult India into the big league once again.

Last year’s calamitous Olympic adventure should serve as a humbling reminder.