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

ABOUT FOUR years ago, when Sjoerd Marijne, then coach of the Indian men’s hockey team, picked a teenage player to represent India at the Commonwealth Games, he was convinced a new star had been discovered. However, when the player flopped in Gold Coast, Marijne was “deeply mystified”. At first, he thought it was because of the pressure of playing in a major tournament. But later, he says, he got to know that captain Manpreet Singh had allegedly told the player “to stop playing so well”.
The Dutchman, who was the coach of the men’s team before leading the women’s side to a horic fourth-place finish at the Olympics last year, has made this claim in his soon-to-be-released book titled Will Power. While the 200-odd page memoir dwells largely on the turnaround of the women’s team, Marijne has also opened up about his tumultuous nine-month stint with the men, which ended following a below-par performance at 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 soon after becoming the coach, has written.
Speaking to The Indian Express from Den Bosch in the Netherlands, Marijne said 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 said 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 said.
When contacted, Singh declined to comment.
Marijne isn’t the first coach to make such allegations about the men’s team. After the 2012 Olympics, former coach Michael Nobbs had alleged in his official report to Hockey India that a group of players from Punjab were focussed more on themselves than the team, and claimed there were plans to “injure a player” so that a stand could be a part of the main team. This was cited Nobbs as a major reason for India’s worst-ever performance at the Olympics. The team had finished last among the 12 teams in London.
Marijne said he and Singh buried the hatchet a few months after the incident and the India captain, under whom the team won the bronze medal at the Tokyo Olympics, even helped with the training of the women’s players before the Games.
For Marijne, who spent close to five years in India, writing the book was a “lockdown project”. Out of habit, he made daily notes of every occurrence during his time in India. The purpose, he said, was mostly to “remember things”. However, in March 2020, when the pandemic began, he decided to structure the rough notes and turn them into a 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 said.
The Indian women’s hockey team was ranked 13th in the world when Marijne took over in February 2017, on the back of a disastrous show at the Rio Olympics where they failed to 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 said.
There were several hurdles along the way, but Marijne said one of the biggest challenges was the attitude towards women’s hockey. “They were not important. It’s all about the men,” he said, pointing to the IPL-style Hockey India League and routine tournaments at home organised for the men while the women barely got any competitive exposure.
“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 said.
Yet, the team defied odds to upset Australia in the quarterfinals at the Tokyo Games and came agonisingly close to a podium finish, losing narrowly to Britain in the bronze medal playoff. That was Marijne’s last match as in-charge of the team.
“In the four-and-a-half years, we had more disappointments than celebrations,” he said. “I wanted to put the girls in the spotlight because that’s what they deserve after all the sacrifices. They are the heroes,” he said.