Lives in Cricket No 12 - Ric Charlesworth

that, writing reports and recommending. But it got to the stage we needed to implement things and there was no capacity to implement things.’ While cricket had been privatised, hockey remained in the public sector, basically run by government, he told this writer in April 2009. He had entered a hockey environment with ‘no structure’. There were about 400 professional hockey players in India and thousands in de-centralised training, but they were just ‘drifting along’, without discipline, quality coaching, facilities or administrative support. ‘The president and secretary used to run things like a personal fiefdom.’ In contrast to Australian hockey, with an office staff of about twenty people, in India ‘there’s just nothing’. There are ‘so many competing factions you don’t know where you stand. People say “yes, yes, yes”, when they have no intention of doing something’. To give teams under his supervision international experience meant engagement with an ‘unimaginable’ government bureaucracy. He might suggest a team tour ‘and two days beforehand some government bureaucrat would say OK.’ But that would be only the start of the problem. When he decided to bring a team to Australia to train for a couple of weeks, they arrived on three different planes on three different days because ‘somebody’s fiddling with the air tickets’. Although his job was not to coach either of the national teams for the Olympics, he had said on arrival that ‘the qualifiers won’t be easy against similarly ranked teams, but I hope both the men and women make it to Beijing’. The Indian men team’s failure, at a tournament in Chile in March 2008, to qualify for the Olympics for the first time since 1928, was not his responsibility in any way: ‘they pushed me away from the team’. But failure ‘pitchforked the Australian into the limelight’, wrote journalist Anand Philar, and he is being bandied about as one who can ‘save’ Indian hockey. It is even being questioned now as to why he did not accompany the Indian team to Chile for the Olympic qualifier last week as if his mere presence would have brought good fortunes. The journalist gave ‘a firm “No”’ to suggestions that ‘Charlesworth should take over as coach’: he could ‘better serve Indian hockey by taking over the junior team and prepare it for the next year’s 84 2002-2009