The postmortem has begun after the medal hopes of the Indian men’s hockey team suffered a premature death on Monday with their 3-5 defeat to Argentina in their last second-stage Pool match.
There are a variety of opinions. While chief coach Craig Fulton feels that the team floundered in the big games despite playing good hockey, current India team forward Sukhjeet Singh believes the defence let them down.
Several former players, however, think that the management erred in not facilitating a smooth transition in the team. One of them is two-time Olympic bronze medallist goalkeeper PR Sreejesh,
who is furious that the juniors are not being given proper exposure.
“Who is there to take the reins when seniors retire? Have we developed a second string? LA Olympics is just two years away and we will play around 30 quality international matches before that. Is that enough to prepare a player for the Olympics? No,” Sreejesh said.
“The 2026 World Cup team is still revolving around the same core group of players while promising juniors like Manmeet Singh, who was the top scorer at the Junior
World Cup with six goals, Amir Ali, Roshan Kujur, Shardanand Tiwari, Talem Priyabarta, Rohit, and Arshdeep Singh were simply overlooked,” he added.
V Baskaran, the gold medal-winning captain from the 1980 Moscow Olympics, echoed Sreejesh. “The transition from junior to senior has not taken place properly. Germany and the Netherlands have had a smooth transition. Look at the Netherlands team from the Paris Olympics and the World Cup – six gold medallists are missing.
“We are selecting the
team on sympathies, past records and numbers,” Baskaran observed.
Another former captain, Pargat Singh, dug deeper, pointing out the problems
in India’s internal hockey structure.
“We don’t have good bench strength due to a lack of robust domestic competitions. In Europe, they have many divisions of league competition, which we don’t have,” he said.
“Earlier, we used to have tournaments like the Beighton Cup, Aga Khan Cup, Bombay Gold Cup, Murugappa Cup, and Nehru Tournament. That structure has been destroyed,” Pargat added.
While it remains to be seen whether the Hockey India officials take any concrete steps for the team’s betterment, Sreejesh, venting his frustration on X, held up a mirror to the authorities. “Does anyone actually care?” he asked.