Hockey India don't "compromise" again..!

As coach Sjoerd Marijne is failed to deliver the results 

September 2017, Hockey India raised the standards for themselves in their decision-making process. The leading authority of Hockey in India made a very "commendable"  decision for the well being of the National hockey team. Hockey India fired the Roelant Oltmans as a head coach of Indian Men Hockey team ‘for lack of results’. Oltmans, who was initially appointed as a High-Performance manager in 2013, became the head coach after Dutchman Paul Van Ass left controversially in 2015.

With this sacking, Rolent Oltmans added into the list of firing international coaches from Indian Hockey. It started with Australian Ric Charlesworth and the list includes Jose Brasa and Australians Michael Nobbs and Terry Walsh. In my opinion and I am sure most of the other hockey lovers are also feeling the same, now it's Sjoerd Marijne who is enjoying every bit of his failure.  Before his supporters will raise the questions, well I doubt if he got any. We must see his performance and no doubt he got the consistency in failure and we know while addressing the media every time he talks about the consistent performance. The question is WHERE is it? 

As we understood the swap policy of Hockey India, they also understand that Sjoerd Marijne didn't deliver the results for the men hockey team and Gold Coast Commonwealth Games was the last nail but the swap policy worked out well in his favour. Now, If Sjoerd Marijne already failed to produce the results with the men hockey team then why he got appointed for the women hockey team again? Hockey India chooses the diplomatic strategy here, why didn't hockey India choose to sack him, as they did with the other big names as mentioned above? If he is not suitable for men national hockey team then how come is suitable for the women national hockey team? 

Let's see his performance as coach. 

You can see clearly in the picture "consistency" is missing but I urge Hockey India to be consistent and ask him the questions about his performance. Some people may challenge he got the recent success in Women World Cup, which I marked as satisfactory performance. But hang on, this team was built by the Harendra Singh and now Sjoerd Marijne is enjoying the glory similarly like Asian Games when women team won the silver medal and we lost final against Japan. Now, please do not forget in 2017 Asia Cup Harendra Singh was the coach of the Indian Women Hockey Team and we beat Japan by 4-2. Harendra is more consistent in his statements, practically, performance and he normally said "We wants to finish with the podium" and he is doing this from Junior World Cup.

Players of men hockey team also raised concerns about the Sjoerd Marijne after the Gold Coast Commonwealth Games. An HI official was quoted by Asian Age as saying (August 2018), "The Gold Coast performance was unsatisfactory and the players too had raised a number of concerns. Be it the coaching methods or team selection, there were many shortcomings (https://www.mykhel.com). He has got only two big achievements, Asia Cup 2017 and World Hockey League Final 2017 and it's marked as good performance in the picture, but after that nothing can be marked as good performance in his tenure. 

I had chances to interview him personally and I also attended the press meets with him during the Gold Coast Commonwealth Games.  To be honest, I am not convinced with his abilities or presentation as a coach and on top of all these, I cannot see he is producing any good results for Hockey India. At last, I will urge Hockey India to make the brave decision and be consistent as we cannot see the consistency in Sjoerd Marijne performance as a coach.

(Normally I write in Punjabi but this time I want to share this information with all the well wishers of the Indian Hockey, so therefore I decided to write in English and on a small note may be coach will also read the first few paragraphs before bashing me on social media 😉)

By: Amrinder Gidda