‘To get friend in, hockey captain told a team mate: Don’t play properly’

ABOUT FOUR years in the past, when Sjoerd Marijne, then coach of the Indian males’s hockey crew, picked a teenage participant to characterize India on the Commonwealth Games, he was satisfied a brand new star had been found. However, when the participant flopped in Gold Coast, Marijne was “deeply mystified”. At first, he thought it was due to the stress of enjoying in a significant event. But later, he says, he acquired to know that captain Manpreet Singh had allegedly instructed the participant “to stop playing so well”.

The Dutchman, who was the coach of the boys’s crew earlier than main the ladies’s facet to a historic fourth-place end on the Olympics final 12 months, has made this declare in his soon-to-be-released e book titled Will Power. While the 200-odd web page memoir dwells largely on the turnaround of the ladies’s crew, Marijne has additionally opened up about his tumultuous nine-month stint with the boys, which ended following a below-par efficiency on the Gold Coast CWG.

“A few weeks later, in one of the meetings after the Games, I learnt from David John, the high-performance director, that this player had claimed that Manpreet told him to stop playing so well because his friends were not able to get into the team. I don’t know if Manpreet had said so as a joke, but it made me so furious,” Marijne, who made Singh the India captain quickly after turning into the coach, has written.

Speaking to The Indian Express from Den Bosch within the Netherlands, Marijne mentioned his intention was “not to harm anyone, but for people to know the situation you are dealing with as a coach and what happens behind the scenes”.

“That (incident) was very difficult because I trusted Manpreet and I never thought he would do this,” he mentioned on Friday. “The reason I put this in the book is not personal, but so that people see how it works in a team and how important a good culture is. It’s an example of how it didn’t work for me and the team, and I hope others can learn from this,” he mentioned.

When contacted, Singh declined to remark.

Marijne isn’t the primary coach to make such allegations concerning the males’s crew. After the 2012 Olympics, former coach Michael Nobbs had alleged in his official report back to Hockey India {that a} group of gamers from Punjab have been focussed extra on themselves than the crew, and claimed there have been plans to “injure a player” so {that a} standby may very well be part of the primary crew. This was cited by Nobbs as a significant purpose for India’s worst-ever efficiency on the Olympics. The crew had completed final among the many 12 groups in London.

Marijne mentioned he and Singh buried the hatchet just a few months after the incident and the India captain, beneath whom the crew gained the bronze medal on the Tokyo Olympics, even helped with the coaching of the ladies’s gamers earlier than the Games.

For Marijne, who spent shut to 5 years in India, writing the e book was a “lockdown project”. Out of behavior, he made day by day notes of each prevalence throughout his time in India. The objective, he mentioned, was principally to “remember things”. However, in March 2020, when the pandemic started, he determined to construction the tough notes and switch them right into a e book.

“The main reason why I wrote this book was to share the process that has been with the team and me, as a coach, with all the ups and downs. It has been a journey with so many disappointments, mentally tough, with a beautiful ending of course, but nobody knows how this came about,” he mentioned.

The Indian ladies’s hockey crew was ranked thirteenth on the planet when Marijne took over in February 2017, on the again of a disastrous present on the Rio Olympics the place they did not win even one match. “The players weren’t happy with themselves, their confidence was low, and the team dynamic was not that great. That’s how we started,” he mentioned.

There have been a number of hurdles alongside the best way, however Marijne mentioned one of many largest challenges was the angle in the direction of ladies’s hockey. “They were not important. It’s all about the men,” he mentioned, pointing to the IPL-style Hockey India League and routine tournaments at house organised for the boys whereas the ladies barely acquired any aggressive publicity.

“Our Olympic qualifiers (in October-November 2019) were the first time in 10 years, I believe, that the Indian women played at home. Their families never saw them playing live. If you organise tournaments, you are guaranteed participation and play better teams, which means you can get points to go higher up the rankings. That helps in growing. The Sports Authority of India and Hockey India were supportive but these were the differences I experienced,” Marijne mentioned.

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Yet, the crew defied odds to upset Australia within the quarterfinals on the Tokyo Games and got here agonisingly near a podium end, shedding narrowly to Britain within the bronze medal playoff. That was Marijne’s final match as in-charge of the crew.

“In the four-and-a-half years, we had more disappointments than celebrations,” he mentioned. “I wanted to put the girls in the spotlight because that’s what they deserve after all the sacrifices. They are the heroes,” he mentioned.