‘To get friend in, hockey captain told a team mate: Don’t play well’
‘To get friend in, hockey captain told a team mate: Don’t play well’: Sjoerd Marijne, the former coach of the Indian men’s hockey team, was confident he had found a new star four years ago when he selected a teenager to play for India at the Commonwealth Games. Although Marijne was “very perplexed” by the player’s failure in Gold Coast, she still rooted for him.
At first, he blamed the nerves associated with competing in a major competition. The captain, Manpreet Singh, was accused of telling the player “to stop playing so well,” but he afterward learned otherwise, he claims.
The Dutchman, who coached the men’s team before guiding the women’s team to a historic fourth-place result at the Olympics last year, makes this assertion in his soon-to-be-released book titled Will Power.
Although the memoir’s two hundred or so pages focus on the women’s team’s remarkable comeback, Marijne has also discussed his rocky nine-month tenure with the men’s squad, which ended after their disappointing showing at the Gold Coast CWG.
In one of the meetings following the Games, I heard from high-performance director David John that a player had claimed that Manpreet had instructed him to back off his performance since some of his buddies had been cut from the squad.
Marijne, who quickly appointed Singh as India’s captain after taking over as coach, has stated, “I don’t know if Manpreet had said so as a joke, but that made me so furious.”
Statements
To The Indian Express, Marijne explained his motivation: “not to harm anyone, but for people to know the circumstances you are dealing with as a coach and what happens behind the scenes.” Marijne is a Dutch coach.
On Friday, he remarked, “That (event) was very difficult since I trusted Manpreet and never dreamed he would do this.” My goal in including this anecdote in the book was not to air dirty laundry but to demonstrate the power of a cohesive group dynamic and the significance of fostering a positive culture.
In saying, “I hope people may learn from this, as it is an example of how it didn’t work for the team and me.”
When asked for comment, Singh politely declined.
That said, Marijne isn’t the first coach to make accusations like this about the men’s team. In his official report to Hockey India after the 2012 Olympics, former coach Michael Nobbs said that a group of players from Punjab were more concerned with themselves than the team and that there were intentions to “injure a player” so that a reserve could join the main squad.
Nobbs
According to Nobbs, this was a crucial factor in India’s worst Olympic result ever. In London, the squad had placed dead last out of 12.
Marijne claimed that he and Singh made up a short time after the event and that the India captain, under whom the team won the bronze medal at the Tokyo Olympics, even assisted with training the women’s players.
This book was a “lockdown project” for Marijne, who lived in India for nearly five years. The man spent his whole stay in India keeping meticulous diaries in which he recorded every single event.
He claimed that “remembering things” was the primary motivation. In March of 2020, however, when the epidemic broke out, he decided to organize the notes and publish them as a book.
“The primary motivation for writing this book was to record the journey that the team and I, the coach, have had together through all of the ups and downs.
No one knows how this happened, but it has been a long and difficult path fraught with disappointments that has ultimately led to something lovely, he said.
After a poor showing at the Rio Olympics, in which they failed to win a single match, the Indian women’s hockey team was ranked 13th in the world when Marijne took over as coach in February 2017.
Remarks
No one on the team was particularly pleased with themselves, nobody had much faith in themselves, and the atmosphere wasn’t very good. “That’s how it all began,” he remarked.
There were several obstacles, but Marijne saw the stigmatization of women’s hockey as one of the most significant. Not that it made any difference, but they were unimportant. Men get a lot of playing time in the IPL-style Hockey India League and regular competitions at home, but women get almost no playing time at all, he claimed.
For the first time in at least a decade, the Indian ladies played at home in our Olympic qualifiers (in October-November 2019). No one in their family ever got to see them play in person.
You can earn more points and move up the rankings if you host events where stronger teams are required to participate. It’s a positive step toward development. While Marijne acknowledges that she received encouragement from Hockey India and the Sports Authority of India, she notes that there were some notable exceptions.
Nonetheless, they shocked the world by defeating Australia in the quarterfinals of the Tokyo Games, and they came so close to a medal that they only narrowly lost the bronze medal playoff against Britain. The game was Marijne’s last as team captain.
He admitted there were more low points than high points throughout the 4.5 years. After making so many sacrifices, I felt it was only fair to give the girls some of the spotlights. Those people, he added, are the real heroes.