The Sports-India Community

Maybe we should all write into the new Sports minister Rajyavardhan Rathore. He should be sympathetic, and will hopefully do something.
I've tweeted as follows:
@Ra_THORe please intervene to stop HockeyIndia's insanity in sacking their 23rd coach in 23 yrs. Each time d team improves they sack coach!

But, but... if the minister intervenes, it is a violation of Olympic charter or whatever, and HockeyIndia will cry foul, you know!! Oh no, the minister can only give our taxpayer money to these worms ("Olympians"), and he cannot tell them anything. That is against all the spirit of what sports is about, you see.

Actually the government tried that when Charlesworth or Walsh was fired. It got nowhere. Batra and gang are untouchable. Bloody hell.

This cow dung about Olympic charter seems to only apply to India. Don't tell me the sports bodies in China are not run by the government!!

Results or no results, I would rather have us not emulate anything that China does. It may yield us results, but the process is not something to be proud of. If any, we should go the US root: concentrate more at the grassroots level and inculcate the cult culture (in a healthy way, I mean) even while following your local gully team. Focus on training thousands and thousands of coaches and let them loose all over the country. Get the basics right and bring in uniformity and standards. With the population that we have, the probability of unearthing freaks of nature is much much higher.

@Jay: I am sure Rathore is well aware of all those crazy rules and knows what his limitations are. So, let's see what changes he can bring in the near future.

- Varma

Varma wrote: ↑Tue Sep 05, 2017 4:02 pm@Jay: I am sure Rathore is well aware of all those crazy rules and knows what his limitations are. So, let's see what changes he can bring in the near future.

Yeah, at least he is an Olympian, with a silver medal that none of these worm-worshipping hockey Olympians have!

Here is Rathore's first major decision:

Waltherus Marijne Named Chief Coach Of Hockey Men's Side. It's a different name than cited earlier. Maybe Swedish names have some different ways of being reported. He does seem to have some relevant experience.

https://sports.ndtv.com/hockey/waltheru ... de-1747716

It's the same guy. He goes by both Waltherus and Sjoerd.

Bloody frigging basta**ds. Now add Rathore to the group. He should be ashamed of himself. If you couldn't stop the bulls**t, at least stay away from tweeting and taking ownership of cow dung. We are back to this guy with NO experience?? I have always had only one requirement for our senior coach - have a medal (or even top-4) finish at Olympics, World Cup, or Champions, as a head coach or an assistant, in the resume. And we go to a guy who has never ever coached a senior national men's side. NO resume, in other words.

Really?? This is what Indian hockey has come to, AGAIN??? I am just mad as hell, I don't know what to say. The Olympians have gone and done it again. Easy prediction. Indian hockey done for the next 4 years at least. Back to #12 in the world soon. Mark it down.

I can only pray that we will stink so badly so fast, and finish 5th at Asiad next year for this guy to be fired within a year, because the chances that we will shoot up to top-3 is almost zero with this no-name coach. The worst is if he gets so-so results and we keep plodding along till 2020, when we will have to fire him with months to go for Olympics.

What on earth is Hockey India upto ? They remove Oltmans who was pretty good ( although may not be great) and replace him with someone who has never coached an international mens team.

I think even Harendra would have been better than him. At least he has worked with a junior world cup winning team and most of those players will be with senior team in next 3 years. But, he becomes coach of women's team. Crazy decision.

I was also thinking may be this time HI had a plan to appoint Indian coach and that would be Harendra Singh.

Oh no, not Harendra. Too much baggage and politics behind him. I would rather have the unknown guy, than a known guy who is pretty incompetent!

I too had thought of Harendra as incompetent guy earlier. But, the way seems to have moulded the junior world cup winning team looked impressive. As most of the players from that team are now also with the senior team, he could be better than a totally unknown guy, maybe.

It is being speculated as to why this appointment was made public by sport ministry rather than HI. It is foolish on part of Rathore to have this as his first major announcement.

The decisions are bizarre no doubt, and Harendra would appear to have a better argument than Waltherus to be the men's hockey coach -- having coached the junior team to the under-21 World Cup last year.

But I wouldn't completely dismiss Waltherus. He did coach the Dutch men's junior team to the bronze at the 2013 junior World Cup. So, not quite Harendra's credentials, but at least he has achieved something while coaching men's hockey. If Harendra can improve the women's team's performance, perhaps he will eventually move to the men's team too.

Moving away from the fiasco of the coaching appointments, some good news from our development (U23?) team that is competing in the Australian Hockey League. We have beaten Western Australia 4-1, with 2 players that I rate highly, Affan & Armaan, both scoring.

Our women's development is also competing in the Australian League. they started off with a 3-1 loss to Victoria.

Losses for both our mens and womens development teams to NSW by 0-1 and 0-7 respectively.