Hockey Anyone ?

OCTOBER 2000 - In a way, the manner in which the Koreans scored the solitary goal at Sydney that snuffed out whatever little hope we had about winning a gold medal, is symbolic of how much the others have advanced and how far have we been left behind. It wasn’t just another goal. The Koreans set us up beautifully. Unlike the typical chauvinistic style of the Pakistanis where one lone attacker takes on the entire team and before long perishes en route to the goal post, the Koreans calmly brought the play into the Pakistan D and there, they set up the kill, passing from one to the other till they had more or less immobilized us. Then, swiftly and without further manipulation, they scored high into the net and that was that. End of story.

Not that we ever looked like winning this one. We were the mercurial lot. Up one day down the next. Demolishing formidable foes one day only to be wiped out by rookies the next day. The same sort of story that’s so often repeated in cricket. At the start of the tense semi final, our coach was seen muttering a silent prayer – certainly not a bad thing to do, but in contrast, the Korean coach was not relying on the heavens above to see his team through. He was coiled up like a spring, urging his boys to go out and do their job. We were relying on fate, they on expertise. We were hoping, they were planning. In the end, the inevitable happened and as Zia Moheyddin once said when we lost without any reason to England, ‘Defeat is our destiny.’

Kim Sang-Ryul, the master strategist manager of the Korean team, sat up all night studying tape after tape of Pakistan’s ace scorer, Sohail Abbas and developing a strategy that would eliminate this dangerous and talented scorer from making a mess of their goal post. When they faced the Pakistanis, the Koreans had decided quite clearly that in making Sohail ineffective they would reduce the Pakistanis to nothing. It was not a brilliant plan of action, but it paid off in trumps and Sohail wasn’t even visible in the 70 odd minutes that the match lasted. He was totally neutralised and in the end, Sohail’s blistering shots in the Korean D, were taken as body blows, the only way the Koreans realised they could stop the ball from tearing into their goal post and their Olympic dream. Jung-woo Lim and Hyung-bae Han took hits on their bodies and served their country tremendously, Jung actually being carried off on a stretcher. Apologists of which breed there is no shortage in the country will say that it was after all just a match, and while this may well be the only way to look at it, the fact is that what happened in the hockey match in Sydney is symptomatic of all that is wrong with us. We are out of the big race. Poor, struggling and without the right infrastructure or systems where talent is recognised, nurtured and developed to the full, we are heavily into divine intervention to save the day for us, but even the heavens have a limit and a country cannot perform just on the basis of its potential or the fact that it practices a certain faith. I think the Koreans may well have intoned divine guidance and support for their success, but unlike us who place more or less all their hopes in being the favoured ones with the powers upstairs, the Koreans and many other nations do that then go one step further and work their rear ends off achieving near-perfect performances.

The Medals Table has increasingly made depressing reading, beating into submission all our newspaper front pages which have to be the world’s most depressed collection of bad news. Day after day, the gap between us and the rest of humanity has increased. Countries like USA, China, Russia, Australia, Germany, France, Great Britain, Netherlands, South Korea, Italy and Japan have polished off something like 400 medals. Costa Rica has won 2, Armenia the same number – even Algeria. Chines Taipei 5, Jamaica 4 even Qatar has 1 and Iceland has 1 too. We are not even in the list. Out of 74 countries which have won medals at this the first Olympics of the 21st century, we are not even there. Neither is Chad and how is that for company ? We have one female athlete out of a possible population of say 75 million women. The only area where we have scored high is the amount of officials who have jetted off to have a good time at our expense and there are any amount of army officers strutting about making fools of themselves. One, Brig. Saulat made a nuisance of himself, shouting at the top of his voice, in, off all the places, the Press Box. He was finally asked to relocate himself and his throat to somewhere else since, unlike Pakistan, Press Boxes are for working journalists, not free loaders. That such people should represent the country and cause us further embarrassment is actually irrelevant, because it has been this way for too many years and always will be this way. Only free loaders make it to events like the Olympics. The good Brigadier who obviously has little idea what a Press Box is, is a sitting DG of the Pakistan Sports Board. In fact there is more brass in the country’s hockey set up than wood, with a Lt.Gen. and at least two Brigadiers running riot in what passes for hockey here. Other sports are equally infected with more men from the barracks who, as the current political scenario dictates, are best suited to run the show. Who can argue with a swagger stick ? This is not confined to the armed forces only. Every government or whatever it is that is seen for a while in the nation’s stoned capital, has to plant their own as soon as they have taken over and had their first nimbu pani, although in the Mian’s case, it was Imli pani (‘increases the appetite,’ a waiter at Model Town once told me). The Mians had their priorities right. When another general took over Pakistan’s cricket affairs, no not the ones where girls are caught in cricketer’s rooms, he was heard advising Pakistan’s legendary leg spinner Abdul Qadir to bowl faster and faster as in the general’s understanding of the game, the faster you could bowl, the more wickets you could capture. ‘Fast, fast, fast,’ he yelled at Qadir who spun the ball violently from hand to hand and wore a look that pigeons have when cats catch them from behind. Someone then explained to the general that Qadir bowled slow stuff because he was spinner but this didn’t cut much ice with the general who snorted and said, ‘nonsense.’

The truth is we are out of the big league, have been for years. You can’t really blame the athletes or hockey players or others who try and fall pathetically short of the bare minimum standards. A country which has its priorities all screwed up inside out, back to front and upside down, cannot produce a man who can run the 110 metre hurdles and come out a world winner at the other end. The rot that passes for public life swings from one end of the scale to the other. This morning, the sight of a grinning ape, Tariq Aziz ‘dukhtay kanon or behtey ankohan ko mera salam’ or if this escapes you, ‘for hurting ears and flowing eyes, greetings from me,’ flanked by such heavy weights as Akhtar Rasool and Sardar Nasim whoever he is, was enough to put me off the toast and tea ritual. These were parliamentarians – ye gods have mercy on us. They probably can’t even spell parliamentarian. What are they grinning about the performing clowns of yesterday ? Look at the picture of these defenders of our constitution and you wouldn’t even buy a bowl of curd from them in a month of Sundays. The gentlemen were storming the Supreme Court. Is it any wonder the Koreans sent us packing in Sydney ?