Lives in Cricket No 12 - Ric Charlesworth

He wasn’t given any support staff and had to endure ‘impossible travelling and living arrangements.’ He went on: ‘I am not crying foul as I knew India would be difficult – I just did not believe it could be this difficult. I still have no computer, no employer- provided phone, no efficient capacity to plan and book travel.’ 37 One reason he had expected India to be difficult was that he’d been going there since the seventies and it’s a country of huge contradictions. It’s fascinating and extraordinary at one level. The teeming multitudes of people are overwhelming sometimes and, you know, the poverty defies belief. Another was that he’d known from the start that his contract was ‘like something from the fifties’. He had shown it to a lawyer in New Zealand who said: ‘in four pages they’ve broken every international covenant on employment; for example, no holidays, no leave … [and] I was given one chair, one table, one TV set.’ ‘I remained unpaid for many months with considerable personal expenditure un-remitted,’ he told the IHF. This was because, he said in April 2009, he had to buy, for example, an air ticket and then send in an invoice. He was still owed some $A75,000. About $A25,000 of this sum was salary, the rest his own expenditure to do the job. The arrangement was for him to be paid partly by the FIH and partly by the IHF. The international organisation had paid its share, the Indian one hadn’t. Without the FIH contribution to his salary he wouldn’t have been able to stay as long as he did. Eventually, resignation seemed the right decision for his family and for himself, he told the ABC: What I was moving into was a formula for a nervous breakdown where there are a whole range of things that needed to be done. I knew what was required and how to get on with it, but there were impossible sort of bureaucratic obstacles in front of me. Although the Indian sporting media was largely pro-Charlesworth – regretting a lost opportunity to revive hockey – his resignation prompted counterattacks from sporting officials. They accused him, according to one Charlesworth supporter, of laziness and financial greed comparable to that allegedly displayed by Greg 86 2002-2009 37 ‘I had no other choice, says Ric Charlesworth’. The Hindu , 12 July 2008, www.hinduonline.com