The last time the Indian men’s hockey team won a gold medal at the Olympics was back in 1980. And if the present-day bureaucrats with their massive egos are anything to go by, the chances of the medal returning home anytime soon are getting increasingly slim. Earlier this week, the men’s hockey coach Paul van Ass revealed that he has been sacked. The reason? He made the mistake of standing up for his players; he intervened and stopped the President of Hockey India, Narinder Batra, as the latter came down during a match to criticise the players for their recent loss to Pakistan.
Batra’s was far from a passionate outburst of a sports fan. According to some reports, he was livid at the prospect of sponsors backing out thanks to the poor performance. Ahead of the meeting of the governing bodies on 24 July, the hockey chief, upset at being told off, has reportedly pulled all stops to ensure the exit of what will be the team’s fifth foreign coach in five years.
The decision comes when there is only a year left for the 2016 Rio Olympics. But then, these precedents were set by Batra’s predecessor, KPS Gill, who suspended as many as 17 coaches during his 15-year tenure.
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