When Indian hockey first went `bronze'

HOW EXTRAORDINARY were the circumstances in which the Pakistan hockey team set out for the 1972 Munich Olympic Games. So extraordinary that, as the team left the country for its Olympics campaign, it was told by the Pakistan powers that be: ``Either come back with the gold medal - or don't bother to come back at all!''

Such an order of priorities was not possible in democratic India, of course. Yet such a message would have been in 1972 place - in the sense that the Long Road to Munich, for Indian hockey, was no longer paved with gold. Or even with silver. It was paved with bronze! Yes, for the first time in the 40-year Olympics history of our hockey leading up to the 1968 Games, India had had to settle for the bronze at Mexico '68. In fact, it was like a bronze-prancer that right-winger Balbir Singh leapt, as he netted the match-winner in the third-place play-off against West Germany. Indian hockey and having to go for a `play-off' to get hold of a mere bronze - it was something unthinkable even after Partition, as Pakistan came into being as a hockey nation.

The `golden' tussle with Pakistan was expected to begin in 1948 itself - with the London Olympic Games. Even allowing for the fact that Pakistan was a nascent nation in hockey then, it was the upset of the half- century to see it beaten by hosts Great Britain 2-0 in the Last Four. This even as India, in its semifinal encounter with the Netherlands, won through 2-1. It meant Pakistan's having to play the Netherlands for the bronze! And even this bronze Pakistan failed to secure in that 1948 London Olympics. After drawing 1-1 with the Netherlands in the play-off for the third place, it was thrashed 4-1 in the re- match! After India had overwhelmed Great Britain 4-0 in the final to retain the 1948 Olympics gold!

But the contest surely had to be keener in the 1952 Helsinki Olympics. So combative now was Pakistan expected to be (as an opponent worthy of our stick) that the man managing our cricket team in England during the 1952 tour, Pankaj Gupta, took anxious time off to go and watch India and Pakistan tussle for the gold at Helsinki. But Pankaj Gupta need not have bothered - Pakistan once again failed to make it to the hockey final! In fact, yet again had Pakistan to contest for the bronze at Helsinki. And yet again had Pakistan to rest content with the fourth place - as dark horse Great Britain came from nowhere to overcome it by the odd goal in three. So Pakistan, in the two Olympic Games after Independence, had failed to reach a position from which it could pose any sort of a threat to India.

But the `final' picture changed dramatically in Pakistan's favour with the 1956 Melbourne Olympics. This is the Games with which begins what I would style `The 1-0 Syndrome' in the case of India and Pakistan. Actually, it was not without a goalless struggle against Germany that Pakistan made it to the 1956 Melbourne final. Whereas, for Balbir Singh's India, getting there had been a piece of cake. Still how you make it to the final is not so vital as how you play in it. And it was a Tartar that the Singhs, Gurdev, Balbir and Udham, caught in the Pakistan defence. Right up to the centre-forward position to which Balbir Singh projected India by notching what turned out to be the gold medal-winner, Pakistan looked like making a match of it.

The 1-0 syndrome thus came into play with a vengeance - in the sense that this was the precise margin by which Pakistan was to beat India, in the final of the 1960 Rome Games, to seal its first-ever Olympics gold. What a hue and cry there was in India, then, as nothing that our forward line (of Joginder Singh, Peter, Jaswant Singh, Udham Singh and Bhola) did seemed to work. India, as a hockey nation, felt traumatised by this 1-0 Rome reverse, though there had been every indication, even earlier, that we were no longer the ``rope-trick performers'' that the British papers had written us up to be in 1952. As the Jakarta Asian Games failed to alter this picture of Pakistan's freshly gained hockey suzerainty, it was in a near state of panic that India went to Tokyo for the 1964 Olympic Games. How can any of us who heard IHF President Ashwini Kumar do the hysterical Akashvani running commentary, in the India-Pakistan final at Tokyo, forget it! Each move forward was a potential goal in his eyes and our ears!

Yet it was a moment frozen in the nation's mindset as right-half Mohinder Lal moved up to take the penalty-stroke awarded in favour of India. I had watched Mohinder Lal extensively - in this area of converting the penalty-stroke. The moment such a stroke came to be awarded, Mohinder Lal had this habit of withdrawing his grip on the stick and rubbing his hands.

The rub now in an India-Pakistan final! As the moment of trial arrived, all India could envision Mohinder Lal poised to take the penalty- stroke. And, as he converted it yet again, the nation went berserk. It was an instant in which AIR and Ashwini Kumar were made for each other. Morarji Desai's pet policeman threw all caution to the Tokyo winds as he cried himself hoarse. How India held on to that slender Mohinder-bestowed lead is Olympics history. As is the fact that it was the 1-0 syndrome that had determined the outcome of an India-Pakistan final yet again.

As we proceeded to lift the gold in the 1966 Bangkok Asian Games too - by what margin if not 1-0 - the level of expectation was high indeed by the time the 1968 Mexico Olympics became the happening thing for Bob Beamon. It is in this light I say that no day in the 1968 calendar was invested with such sad significance, for sport in India, as October 24, 1968. For that black-letter day, not only did we re-shed our sheen as hockey gold medallists but, also, all was over bar the shouting for the bronze. Mexico 68 was the first time we failed to make it to the hockey final in an Olympiad. Our 2-1 October 24 reverse at the hands of Australia, coming as it did on the sluggish heels of a similar- score defeat inflicted upon us by New Zealand (in the lung-opener itself of that 1968 Olympics contest), left us no less dazed than when we had been humbled 1-0 by Pakistan, for the gold, in the 1960 Rome Games.

Such was the gloom into which the nation was plunged by this unprecedented loss of face in the hockey world that no less a personality than Indira Gandhi, as Prime Minister of India, felt constrained to describe our exit from the Olympics gold picture as springing from ``lack of discipline and single-minded purpose''. Mrs. Gandhi had cause to feel concerned seeing that, out of Rs. 2,84,900 granted by her government for the 1968 Mexico Games, Rs. 2,17,560 had been spent on endeavouring to keep our hockey supremacy intact! After Tokyo '64 and Bangkok '66, the nation had reason to look optimistically forward to a hat-trick of gold medals. Yet here were our hockey mentors now telling us that a bronze need not be viewed as a national calamity!

The saddest part of our failure was that V. J. Peter - our forward hope from 1960 Rome down - at no point exhibited any of his wizardry at Mexico. In fact, after our highly fortuitous 1-0 victory over East Germany (in India's seventh match of the 1968 tournament), a non- partisan hockey correspondent like Peter Rowley had this to say: ``It is surprising that, in spite of the poorest game by Inder and Peter in all the Olympic matches, they were not dropped from the team. Inam-ur-Rehman was undoubtedly better than these two and should have been given an opportunity to play.''

The tone for our non-showing, at Mexico, had been set when, in an unseemly Dalmiya-Bindra style of wrangle, Gurbux Singh was named Joint Captain - after Prithipal Singh was announced as the captain! Spain's Manager Luis Sarda was the first to crystal-ball gaze our reduction to bronze standing. Sarda sized up the situation neatly when, following Spain's solitary-goal defeat at our hands, he noted: ``India are not playing like the Olympic champions any more!'' The high skills of the game - like the dribble, the feint, the body swerve and the reverse flick - were nowhere in evidence, as India huffed and puffed against 7th- finishing New Zealand (1-2), 6th-finishing Spain (1-0); 9th- finishing Belgium (2-1), 13th-finishing Japan (0-0) and 11th- finishing East Germany (1-0). In fact, against lowly East Germany, it was only skipper Prithipal Singh's abiding ability to strike like a viper from a penalty-corner that saw us scrape through.

Why, even against wooden-spooning hosts Mexico, who (observed Peter Rowley) ``have been playing hockey for no more than three years and would not rate as a good club side, a dreadfully disappointing display it was''. Concluded Peter Rowley: ``India might have trounced Mexico, the weakest team in the (1968) Olympic hockey tournament, by 8 goals to nil but, if the crowd came to see an exhibition of Indian magic, they saw very little of it. A vintage Indian team would have had no trouble in scoring 20 goals.''

Like how hosts United States had been pulverised 24-1 in the 1932 Los Angeles Games by a vintage Indian forward line made up of Carr, Gurmit Singh, Dhyan Chand, Rup Singh and Jaffer. So pathetic was our showing at Mexico that it came as an agreeable surprise when we lifted the World Cup in 1975. After that, in our grasp, was the gold medal at the 1980 Moscow Olympics - even if against opposition of not the highest order, given the political boycott of that Games by certain leading nations. Now K.P.S. Gill yet again promises that the gold is round the short corner. The short point is that Indian hockey lost its vital spark when Prithipal Singh, in 1968, took an Olympics `stand' we had never before that done - the stand on which his `ascent' showed us downgraded to No 3. That 1968 Mexico bronze remains a jolt you feel to this day. Only the gold superimposed on that bronze, in 2000 A.D., could erase the memory of the `Mexicoin' rolling so diminishingly against India in 1968.

RAJU BHARATAN

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Section  : Sport
Previous : Opening a new vista
Next     : Girded by struggles, Loroupe runs for Kenyan gold