It is going to be a
nerve-wracking day at Chepauk ~ after Karun Nair tryst with destiny – that 303*
joining the elite club where Virender
Sehwag was a loner ! – some of us are following Tamil Nadu’s fortunes in Ranji
as well. Kaushik Gandhi's double ton
and Vijay Shankar's century helped Tamil Nadu garner three points, owing to
their first innings lead, and grab the third position in the points-table of
Group A. BCCI has since announced the revised schedule – Semis are to be held in
Rajkot and Nagpur respectively, with both matches starting on 1 January, 2017. QF
Line up will be :
Hyderabad
vs Mumbai in Raipur; . Karnataka vs Tamil Nadu in Visakhapatnam; Gujarat vs Odisha in Jaipur and Haryana vs Jharkhand in Vadodara
None
of the seven venues named for the knockouts is home for any of the eight teams
that have qualified, ensuring that each match will be on completely neutral
territory – a new experiment that the Indian cricket board has implemented for
the 2016-17 season. According to a report, Ravichandran Ashwin and Murali Vijay
have been picked by the Tamil Nadu team for the knockouts.
Just as we
remember 25th June 1983, 29th July 1980 is a day to
remember for Hockey fans – the day India won Gold in Men’s Hockey in Moscow
Onlympics. The team under V Baskaran's leadership then, stood like a
rock when Spain's rampaging Juan Amat had lurked the defence line in the last
ten minutes as he almost pulled off parity.
Back home, this week,
there was reason to celebrate as India played with intensity and imagination,
seldom allowing their opponents any foothold in the match. The celebrations
that ensued were understandably wild. Gurjant Singh would have lived the
scenario several times in his dreams: a World Cup final, the crowd cheering
him, and he beating the goalkeeper with a fierce hit. But even in his dreams,
the 21-year-old wouldn’t have executed it with such precision. Varun Kumar, the
scorer of India’s first goal in the junior World Cup, spotted an idle Gurjant
near the Belgian ‘D’. You could have forgiven the European side for assuming it
was harmless to leave Gurjant unmarked. It isn’t India’s style, after all, to
play long, aerial balls. But this Indian style has ditched several old ways.
And the Belgians would realize that the hard way. That Varun dared to play the
lobbed ball – that travelled half the length of the field from right to left –
was a surprise in itself. Belgian defenders were caught off guard and they
failed to control it. Gurjant was the first to reach. He controlled the
wobbling ball with the two deft touches and took it away from the defenders. To
close Gurjant’s angle, Belgium goalkeeper Loic van Doren charged towards him.
Gurjant looked up, saw the tournament’s best goalkeeper running towards him,
then spotted faintest of gaps between him at the post, and from an acute angle,
unleashed a reverse hit that flew past Van Doren.
It was one
of the finest goals of the tournament, if not the finest. And it couldn’t have
come at a more crucial moment. That goal, in the 8th minute, changed how the final would be played.
India beat Belgium to be crowned as
Champion. The 2016 Men's Hockey Junior World Cup was the 11th edition of the Hockey Junior World Cup held
in Lucknow, India from 8–18 December 2016. It certainly was the hardwork and unity as a
team that got them there – and there were many sacrifices too, writes Indian
Express.
Harendra Singh, the team’s
coach, days before the team left for its first tournament in 2014, received a
call from his family informing him that his cousin – an Armyman – had
sacrificed his life while fighting insurgents in Mizoram. The Johor Cup in Malaysia in October 2014
was the first time Harendra had a proper assessment of his players. He had been
appointed coach six months earlier, but they had been involved only in camps. This
wasn’t the only tragic incident Harendra suffered as he prepared his bunch of
world beaters. In December last year, as the team’s preparation entered its
home stretch, Harendra’s son injured his right eye in a freak accident while
playing football. His retina was damaged to such an extent that 80 per cent
vision was lost in the eye. Others in the team too made sacrifices. Santa
Singh, who started in the midfield in every match of the tournament, chose to
skip his sister’s funeral last year while back-up goalkeeper Pathak did not
travel to Nepal for his father’s last rites because he wanted to travel with
the team for one of their most important exposure tournaments before the World
Cup in July.
These incidents brought
the team together, Harendra says. “We have a Whatsapp group so everyone
gathered in the team meeting room within five minutes. And they would not let
the player who suffered the loss stay alone even for a moment. Someone or the
other was there to take care of him,” Harendra says. The coach himself focused
on the emotional and psychological needs of the players, knowing well that
these are the two key areas where Indian players had invariably faltered. In
his first meeting with the players, he reminded them of the Sydney Olympics
debacle, where India conceded a late goal against Poland to miss out on a
semifinals berth.
Hockey fans
should relisht he golden moments of
Indian hockey rather than recalling that
one humiliating loss killed the backbone taking away the fanfare and following
for the game – that dark day of Dec 1982 when the whole Nation sat
before TV sets watching Indo Pak game in the finals of Delhi Asiad – and sadly,
team lost badly. In the 1982 Asian Games
final, India met with arch rivals Pakistan. Back then, hockey, like cricket
later, was the symbol of Indian pride. In a country deprived of sporting glory,
the legend of hockey was the perfect metaphor for a country trying to hold its
head high on the world stage. Its stars, Zafar Iqbal and Mohammad Shahid, were
extensions of India's honour.
India
raced to the finals, decimating every opponent by huge margins in the group
stage, scoring 37 goals and conceding just one. The team's performance on home
ground, the euphoria of holding a successful Games and of winning 13 gold
medals, gave Indians the hope that a win in the hockey finals, by beating
Pakistan, would be the crowning glory. It was not to be. After scoring the
first goal through a penalty stroke and triggering raucous premature
celebrations across the country, India lost 1-7 to Pakistan, whose forwards
attacked the Indian half like a cavalry on a roll. The prime minister, stunned
by the humiliation, left midway; fans started crying and the mood quickly turned
funereal. That day, stoves were not lit in many Indian households.
Indian Express now adds
that at Lucknow, it became obvious that Indians still love their hockey. On the
day of the final, Lucknow's Dhyan Chand Stadium was spilling over with
spectators. "It was a record turnout for a junior World Cup match, forcing
the organisers to open sections of the stadium which were covered until Sunday,
for the fear that everyone may not accommodated. They could’ve built a couple
of more tiers and still run short of space to accommodate people." That
Indian hockey is on the upswing is apparent. Over the past few years, the
Indian team has eclipsed all its Asian rivals, racing ahead of Pakistan,
demolishing Malaysia and South Korea, who after the highs of the 80s and the
90s appear to be in terminal decline.
The junior team's victory
could well be the big-bang moment just as 1983 WC win was for Cricket. This is a team that can dominate the kind of
hockey that is played on astro-turf with its fast, relentless attacks that come
in unending waves and score from unexpected angles and positions. The good news
for Indian hockey is that some of these players would soon replace the ageing
players in the senior team and give a new push to India's quest for glory.
Could we see the
resurgence ~ Happy days are back again for Indian Hockey
Regards – S. Sampathkumar
20th Dec 2016.
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