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Paris Olympics 2024: The hunger driving India’s hockey team
Summary
The Indian men’s hockey team has overhauled its playing systems. They are no longer has-beens. A bronze medal would now be a disappointmentOn 4 August 2021, a hot and humid day in Tokyo, the members of the Indian men’s hockey team gathered at a small park outside their apartments at the Olympic Games Village for an informal meeting. No coaches or support staff, just the 16 players—this was personal. This was a reckoning with a dream. This was about a fundamental question: what was the nature of the hunger that drove them here?
For Sumit Kumar Valmiki, the hunger was literal. He was nine years old when he joined his older brother to work as a cleaner at the dense cluster of dhabas at Murthal, Haryana, on NH-44. They would arrive at the eatery at 4 in the morning, clean, and leave for home with the meals for the day for the entire family—dal, one vegetable dish, rotis. It was an important source of food for Sumit’s family, all sanitation workers from a small village nearby. Sumit would then go to school, before ending his day with hockey practice, dreaming that one day the game would save him and his family from their financial distress.
“I knew where I came from, and I was proud of where I had reached," Sumit says of that day, “Now I wanted to see it through."
For Amit Rohidas, from the tribal belt of Sundergarh in Odisha, where hockey is played by one and all, it was about a death. He too came from a family in acute poverty. His parents were daily wage labourers on farms and construction sites. Rohidas fashioned his own hockey stick from a branch, just as his father, an active local player, had done for himself.
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Rohidas’ hockey skills had landed him in a government sports programme, and a decade later, in the Indian team. His father’s dream was to watch him play at the Olympics. Instead, a few months earlier, at the height of the pandemic, his father had died while Amit was at the preparatory camp for the Olympics.
“How happy he would have been to see me here," Rohidas says. “I wanted to do it for him. I knew he was watching me."
For Hardik Singh, it was the burden of history felt at a personal level. His father Varinderpreet had played for India. His grandfather was a sought-after coach in the Kapurthala area in Punjab. His uncle Jugraj is famed as one of the finest drag-flickers to ever play for India. His aunt Rajbir Kaur had captained the women’s team to gold at the Asian Games, and her husband Gurmail Singh was a member of the 1980 Olympic-gold winning team, the last time India had won an Olympic medal in hockey.
“Growing up, all that anyone in the family talked about was hockey," Hardik says. “How we are the greatest hockey nation in the world, how we won six straight Olympic golds without losing a match (India have a total of eight Olympic golds in hockey, the most for any country), and how far we have fallen. But there was also constant hope, that this generation, or the next, or the next, will wake Indian hockey up."
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That generation was here: The next day, India came from three goals down to win a thrilling match against powerhouse Germany 5-4 in the bronze medal play-off. With that, the team wrote their names in the annals of India’s hockey history as the ones who brought the glory back, the first Olympic medal in 41 years.
Going for gold
Three years later, on a hot April day in Bhubaneshwar’s Kalinga Stadium, the goal has shifted. Now the Indian team, sweating it out in an intense practice session just weeks away from the Paris Olympics, the sun blasting down on the bright blue AstroTurf, are no longer has-beens, but medal contenders. Now a bronze would be a disappointment.
“I may not get to sit and eat dinner with the family if it’s not gold," Hardik says now with a chuckle, but he is only half joking.
Captain Harmanpreet Singh, a prolific scorer and one of the world’s best drag-flickers, confirms that the expectation is to finish on top.
“We have some players making their fourth appearance, some making their debut, for me this is the third Olympics," he says. “I believe we have it all. The best of youth, the best of experience, the best players in each of the critical positions. The ambition is gold, yes, but the focus is on how we can each be at our absolute best in Paris."
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With this focus in mind, the Indian team has worked to overhaul their playing systems over the last one year with new coach Craig Fulton, a former Olympian from South Africa, but more importantly, the former assistant coach of the 2018 World Cup and 2020 Olympics winning Belgian team. Fulton is clearly a man who knows everything there is to know about the modern strategies that bring success in the game.
Fulton’s team has had early success, with a dominating campaign at the 2023 Asian Games in September-October, where they won gold for the first time since 2014, while going unbeaten, scoring 68 goals and conceding just nine.
But Fulton’s real work started after the Asian Games; he embarked on a months-long process to transform the team from one that played only a direct, attacking style, committing bodies forward in a high press. This is a tactic that works well against Asian teams, but falters against the more organised European and Australian teams. To be truly successful, Fulton wanted India to be a more balanced side that can shift from one playing style to another seamlessly.
“The top 3 (the Netherlands, England, Belgium; India are ranked 4th going into Paris), their organisation is too good," Fulton says. “They’ve done their video analysis, it’s too easy to understand now if a team plays in one dimension. They will lure you into a trap and hit you when you have left a lot of space for them to exploit."
To help him implement these changes, Fulton has the aid of a nine-member support staff, including fellow South African Olympian Rhett Halkett, former India centre forward Shivendra Singh, Belgian video analyst Artur Lucas, Australian strength and conditioning coach Alan Tan, and data—tons and tons of data.
“Everything that the team does on the field, whether it’s training sessions or matches, is recorded for video analysis," Lucas says, “we have hundreds of hours of footage to work with."
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Add to the footage, biometric data: Every single training session and match is also tracked by wearable GPS devices on each individual player, recording heart rates, speed, acceleration, deceleration, and movement patterns among other things.
“Everything we are capturing is cut into different tactical situations, like, how many circle entries (the area around the opponent’s goal where scoring opportunities arise) did we get?" explains Lucas. “What were the outcomes of those entries and why? Or, when we press, how many balls do we win and where?"
Each action is categorised, and there are layers upon layers of interpretation. For example, at the most fundamental level, the game is split into two phases, unstructured and structured. A “transition" (when play moves from defence to attack or vice versa) or winning/losing the ball are “unstructured"—unpredictable situations that players need to react to. A “press" (a defined formation in which players of one team will pressure the team that has the ball by cutting off passing and movement areas) or an “outlet" (the act of moving the ball out of defence and into attacking positions) are “structured"—the players are actively creating these situations, not reacting to them.
“We are seeing all this, both at a collective and at an individual level, these movements in space and time and what outcomes come from what action," says Lucas.
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For Fulton, the key areas of work have been to get the defence more organised, be more consistent in sticking to shapes and strategies with the ball and without the ball, and be very, very quick in shifting from defence to attack mode.
“Instinct and flair have always been the strengths of Indian hockey," says Fulton. “What I’m looking for is the balance between having the freedom to express themselves but having a really organised structure defensively to fall back on."
Players have had to go through a steep learning curve to fit into Fulton’s vision. Hardik, a dribbler par excellence, epitomises the traditional Indian strengths on the field.
“All my work has been on finding the right positions, the right passes," says Hardik, “and I have learnt a lot about making the right on-field decisions about when it is necessary to dribble or carry the ball forward. These are the things that make a difference between winning and losing."
As India’s most potent midfield weapon—he was outstanding at the Asian Games—Hardik is expected to drive the campaign in Paris.
What’s at play
The change in the team’s style of play has also involved meticulous work in the physical department, so that the conditioning matches what the players are expected to do on the turf.
The gym at the sumptuously equipped and meticulously maintained Kalinga Stadium buzzed with the players of the Indian hockey team during one evening session—Punjabi hip hop played on the speakers, players worked both alone and in pairs, big weights clanked and thudded, and good-natured ribbing was the mood of the day. The team’s talismanic goalkeeper P.R. Sreejesh, a tall, muscular man who was one of India’s stand out players in the Tokyo campaign and will be making his fourth Olympic appearance at Paris, was the centre of attraction for his heavy lifts and athleticism.
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“The difference," the team’s strength and conditioning coach Tan says, talking over the din, “is that the previous style of play involved a lot of running up and down, and now we are sitting and playing in a zone without shifting too much. This means shorter distances to run, but at higher speeds. We want to get to positions to close off space quickly when we don’t have the ball, and to get to positions to open space quickly when we have the ball."
Like with most team sports involving a ball and a goal, the three things that define a great athlete in hockey is acceleration, deceleration or braking, and the ability to quickly change direction (think Lionel Messi in football).
Whether in the gym or out on the AstroTurf, the focus for Tan has been to improve these three things for each of India’s players (except the goalkeeper, whose work has centred on agility and reflexes).
“Each week we do at least two sessions of ‘speed exposure’," says Tan, “where we are looking at maximal acceleration and maximal speed. We have to get the dosage correct as to how much and how often we are getting the guys to hit that, so we can get positive adaptations (too little and there’s no improvement, too much and the body does not recover). That’s where the live tracking via GPS wearables comes in. They have them on at all times, and it’s constantly giving me the feedback I need to tweak the workout."
While the top speed work is done typically for 15m distances, there’s a lot of high tempo (not max speed, but high enough for a long enough distance) running as well, Tan elaborates, including multiple “exposures" to the worst-case match scenario, having to run 60m, almost the entire length of the pitch, in the case of a counter-attack at top speed.
“Plus, like in any sport that involves running, our workouts are plyometric heavy, involving lots of running drills, pushing weighted sleds, bounding, horizontal and vertical jumps, single leg and double leg variations of all of that, it’s a long list…" says Tan.
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At the elite athletic level, the strength work in the gym involves a vast array of exercises targeting small muscles and big, in many different ranges of motion. Some are done for power, some for strength, some for agility, involving both compound lifts (which involve the whole body, like squats and deadlifts and Olympic lifts like the snatch) and isolated lifts (that work one muscle or muscle group in isolation). But even here, Tan says, “our focus is to get players stronger for accelerating, braking, and changing direction, and we modify or pick exercises to support that."
“It’s all happening," Fulton says. “All the pieces are in place. And if you look at the quality of players we have—Harmanpreet is one of the best drag-flickers in the world, Sreejesh has been one of the best goalkeepers in the world for years, Hardik has been sensational in attack—I think we can dream of the holy grail. An Olympic gold. Imagine what that will do to hockey in the country."
Rudraneil Sengupta is the author of Enter the Dangal, Travels Through India’s Wrestling Landscape.
