It was July 2004 and Athens Olympics was weeks away. Indian Hockey Federation (IHF) Chief KPS Gill suddenly realized that the prospects was not too rosy. He had tried hard to improve the game since becoming president in July 1994 and had changed nine coaches. But, alas, IHF was (and still is) overcrowded with favour-seeking cronies, too terrified of facing the despot’s wrath and telling him: “You may get the title of ‘supercop’ by grooming hundreds of ‘fake encounter’ cops and forcing clamorous people to shut up and meekly accept the writ of powers that be; but the tactic does not work when applied to sports, Sir!”

IHF delivered the worst imaginable humiliation in 2004 to Rajinder Singh, former star defender, who was coaching the team. He was flown all the way to Germany before being unceremoniously dumped. The boss felt that coaching was not up to mark. “We have to review the whole thing urgently because Olympics is just three weeks away,” he said. Rajinder Singh was not the first to face the impulsive hockey czar’s hubris. Earlier, Cedric D’Souza had been appointed before the 1994 World Cup and was discarded by 1996 Olympics. He was recalled by IHF to mentor the team and was discarded in the midst of the 2002 Kuala Lumpur world cup.

Almost four years down the line, Indian hockey has suffered the worst ignominy imaginable. Despite the proud record of participating for 80 years without a break, and with a record eight golds to its credit, India cannot even enter the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The plunge, of course, has not been too sudden. India’s last hockey gold had come way back in 1980 at Moscow Olympics, that too because it was boycotted by top nations.

India was forced to compete in a qualifier round as it lost its entitlement for automatic participation, having failed to reach Asian Games Final at Doha in Qatar in 2006.

Olympian Joaquim Carvalho, who is chief hockey coach, said bravely, ““Failure to qualify for the Olympics is not the end of the road for Indian hockey. We now have to start from scratch and renew our attempt to become one of the top teams in the world.” But, he is more than aware of the ‘punishment’ the IHF bosses would mete out to him on arrival. So, he added, “In any case, for the moment, I am firm in my decision to step down along with assistant coaches Mohinder Pal Singh and Ramesh Parameswaran."

After all, IHF had sacked national coach veteran Vasudevan Baskaran to give the responsibility to Carvalho. That was after India finished at Number 5 in Asian Games 2006 in the wake of the disastrous 2006 World Cup campaign, placed at Number 11. Bhaskaran, after coming to know of the IHF decision from the media, had quipped, “Going by the media report, I can definitely say that the federation is going five years backwards and it will take lot more time for a new coach to analyse and implement changes.”

The bosses of IHF, which was once described as “mad house” by Gerhard Rach of Germany have no use for such advice, which invariably fall on deaf ears. They do not discriminate between Indians and foreigners when it comes to beheading the coach to escape responsibility of any disastrous performance. Rach, who was appointed just before the Athens Olympics, was shown the door barely five months later, because he did not agree with Gill’s totalitarian style of keeping players and coaches in tenterhooks in the guise of discipline.

IHF secretary K Jothikumaran, a Gill loyalist, had the audacity to claim to Reuters, “Rach was only a short-term arrangement. He has no value to continue.” In fact, India had taken the same position at Athens, Number 7, which it had at Sydney four years earlier. Also in 2004, India beat Germany, which lifted the World Cup in 2006, even as India has plunged to Number 11.

In Jan 2005, after sacking Rach, Gill confessed, “The federation has made a couple of mistakes. . . appointing Rach was one of them. It was an error of judgment; our assessment of his character was wrong.” The IHF boss apparently expected him to meekly submit to the “Ji Huzoor” compliance demanded of coaches! Rach has now become wise to realities prevailing in India. He said recently, “I quit because I reacted like a German. During the last four years I have learned a lot. If I am given the post again I will react like an Indian. I have won back the friendship of IHF president KPS Gill and Secretary Jyotikumaran.”

A netizen had posted this comment when a portal had carried an article about one of the sordid sacking episodes of IHF: “Only solution is removal of Mr Gill from IHF then only we will have the word 'Hockey' in India in future; otherwise next generation will not have the word.” That is an obvious truth everyone would agree.

World Cup 2010, allotted to India, is just two years away. We have to start with a systematic professional approach immediately if India has to come out with a decent performance. Also, planning and working from now onwards is absolutely essential if India is not to be kept out of 2012 Games as well. But, the attitude of Indian bosses is summed up in a statement by Gill in 2005, in which he confessed to his ‘error of judgment’: “We have enough time to search for a good coach from inside the country or outside. . . We don’t want to take any decision in a hurry.” In the scheme of things for the ‘national’ game of India, the ‘boss’ has all the right to go on making mistakes, and at his leisure!