Worst Performance At Beijing

They have gone on to be beaten by New Zealand, who won their only Olympic Games hockey gold medal back in 1976 at Montreal, and had never before beaten Pakistan at an Olympiad. In recent years, the 'Black Sticks' have defeated Pakistan only three times in 15 hockey matches: now, they have done so in two back-to-back encounters

By Gul Hameed Bhatti

The curtain finally fell on Pakistan's campaign on early Thursday morning at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, when the country's national hockey team -- once the heart and soul of Pakistan's previous efforts at the various Olympiads of the past, succumbed to the generally benign New Zealand outfit by a 4-2 margin and occupied a pathetic eighth place in the competition. Without any doubt, this has been Pakistan's worst Olympic Games ever since their first at London in 1948, sixty years ago.

Pakistan were confident of at least finishing among the top four in the hockey event when their 21-member playing squad plus a good number of contingent and team officials flew over to the Chinese capital in early August. They missed that spot, by miles.

Winning a medal remained a pipe dream. Starting from Atlanta in 1996, through Sydney 2000 and Athens 2004, they will now return empty-handed from their fourth successive Olympiad. But the hockey team has never stooped as low as it has at Beijing. Pakistan's worst previous finish was sixth at Atlanta twelve years ago. Now, Pakistan hockey has slumped to the depths of number eight.

Once they get back home, heads are surely going to roll. The head of Pakistan Hockey Federation (PHF) chief Mir Zafarullah Jamali is certain to be on the chopping block, as recent reports have suggested. There could even be sweeping changes at the Pakistan Olympic Association (POA) and Pakistan Sports Board (PSB) headquarters. Several players too are going to be shown the door. Pakistan hockey could also have a new captain taking over.

But, is all that going to raise the standard of our sports? Let's be realistic. It's been a long time, in fact it was almost a decade and a half ago that the Pakistan hockey team won a major international title. At the Olympic Games, apart from three gold medals and an overall tally of eight, in sixty years Pakistan have to show only two medals in individual sports -- both bronze, one in wrestling back in 1960 and another in boxing in 1988. Even that was as long as twenty years ago.

Pakistan's stock has fallen even at the Asian Games and Commonwealth Games level after some heady and exciting moments in the early years after the country's independence. At Doha in Qatar two years ago, Pakistan had their worst ever Asian Games. In the Commonwealth event at Melbourne earlier the same year (2006) the story was not any different.

Hockey, especially, has seen a gradual slump which has been quite rapid at times. In the years after the Athens Olympic Games in 2004, where the team finished fifth and skipper Mohammad Nadeem ND announced his retirement soon after, the only decent win attained by Pakistan was at Amstelveen in August 2005. Pakistan won the Rabobank Trophy there, their greatest satisfaction coming from beating Olympic champions Australia in the final by a 4-3 margin.

Yes, Pakistan also won a four-nation tournament in Moscow in July last year. But it was Scotland who they defeated in the final. The other two teams were lowly-rated Russia and Ukraine.

Similarly, Pakistan's winning the Setanta Trophy contest in Dublin two months ago was also not an affair to celebrate. They beat Canada in the final to lift the cup. In fact, in the preliminaries they only managed to defeat hosts Ireland while both Canada and Great Britain held them to draws.

THE WRITING WAS ON THE WALL

Even before the Pakistan contingent left for Beijing, there were no real expectations attached to the hockey team or the five other athletes who were to represent the country. Hockey chief selector Islahuddin Siddiqui, a successful former captain and manager/coach, believed Pakistan had the potential of finishing among the top four, however.

The team's chief coach Khawaja Zakauddin made a statement after Pakistan lost its opening match to Great Britain that really bordered on the ridiculous. He said that the team was going to 'target' the Netherlands next. The match against Netherlands was the last one in the pool. Pakistan beat Canada and South Africa while being beaten by Australia and, by the time they faced the Dutch, they had virtually been thrown out of the semifinals race.

Even Hanif Khan, one of the staunchest critics of the current hockey set-up and Pakistan's vice-captain of the gold-winning team at Los Angeles 1984, suggested at one point that Pakistan was capable of finishing fifth at Beijing. All the words of wisdom fell flat.

The writing was, in fact, already on the wall. Someone should have cared to read it. Eversince Zeeshan Ashraf took over as captain, Pakistan's spirits have really not risen. In a five-match series in China last March, the team barely scraped to a 3-2 win. At Beijing, China were playing South Africa for the last two positions in the 12-team hockey event on Saturday.

Pakistan finished fourth at the Sultan Azlan Shah Cup in Ipoh and then got thrashed by Germany and Belgium twice each when they toured those countries. All they had to show was a win in Dublin. A year earlier, Pakistan had failed to even qualify for the Champions Trophy played in Rotterdam in 2008.

They have again lost the chance to be in the Champions Trophy -- for the third time in thirty years -- as the top six teams in the Beijing Olympiad were to qualify for the next year's event in Melbourne, Australia. They will now have to wait for the 2009 Champions Challenge to go through to the 2010 Champions Trophy. But they will have to emerge as the tournament's winner first!

Needless to say, Pakistan hockey has not been able to keep up pace with the rapidly changing scenario in international sport. They have not taken in the change of rules, the fast play required to excel on an artificial surface, sponsorship and job satisfaction hardly exist in Pakistan. Players wanting to feature in the lucrative leagues abroad are not only reprimanded but also banned and rejected in several cases. An overall change in attitude is what's required for starters.

Pakistan's performance on the hockey field has been extremely poor since the Athens Olympiad of 2004. Apart from the Rabobank Trophy triumph three years ago, they have never finished above third place in tournaments of international importance. In the Champions Trophy events in this period, their display has been dismal: third at Lahore 2004, fifth at Chennai 2005, fifth again at Terrassa 2006 and seventh at Kuala Lumpur 2007. In the 2006 World Cup at Monchengladbach, Pakistan had ended a poor sixth.

They did take a silver medal at the 2006 Commonwealth Games hockey contest in Melbourne, but were third at the Asian Games at Doha the same year. They slumped to sixth place at the Asia Cup played in Chennai in 2007.

In the four Azlan Shah Cup competitions played in the last four years, Pakistan have finished third, fifth, sixth and fourth. Quite shameful for a team which has won this prestigious title on three previous occasions.

And then they go on to be beaten by New Zealand, who won their only Olympic Games hockey gold medal back in 1976 at Montreal, and had never before beaten Pakistan at an Olympiad. In recent years, the 'Black Sticks' have defeated Pakistan only three times in 15 hockey matches: now, they have done so in two back-to-back encounters!

KIRAN KHAN'S BEST NOT GOOD ENOUGH

As always, the other athletes in the contingent made poor journalistic copy. Shooter Siddiq Umar appears to have qualified for his two events after his performances at home and abroad in recent months, but two members of the track and field squad and a couple of swimmers earned entry to the Olympic Games through wild cards. Two of them were females. All performed pathetically, just as expected, of course.

The teenaged girl swimmer Kiran Khan, however, bettered her personal record of 30.93 by completing her 50 metres freestyle heat in 29.84 seconds. Unfortunately, she finished sixth out of eight in an event which was won by Germany's Britta Steffen in a new Olympic record time of 24.06 seconds.

Kiran's male colleague Adil Baig swam his 50 metres freestyle heat in 25.66 seconds. He was seventh out of eight. Overall, he was ranked 74th out of 97 in the race. Kiran ended at the 69th spot out of 90 contestants.

Pakistan's 100 metres female sprinter Sadaf Siddiqui finished a poor seventh out of eight runners, with a time of 12.41 in her heat, which was far below her national record of 11.81 seconds. Jamaica's Shelly-Ann Fraser won gold with a time of 10.78 seconds. In fact, two other Jamaican girls tied for the second spot in the final, and both were awarded silver medals.

Abdul Rasheed turned out to be a big disappointment. For someone, who has a personal best time of 14.24 seconds in the 110 metres hurdles -- and ran in a time of 14.18 at the Islamic Games in Makkah back in 2005, coming in eighth and last in his heat at Beijing in a really poor 14.52 seconds was almost shocking.

Rasheed's time was in fact so slow that all the other thirty-nine (39) runners in the various heats did better than him. Late on Thursday evening, with China's celebrated hurdler Liu Xiang, who won the gold medal at Athens 2004, having bowed out through injury, Cuba's world record holder Dayron Robles ran away with the 110 metres hurdles glory gaining a gold in 12.93 seconds. Robles had run the event in a mere 12.87 seconds earlier this very year.

And what about our lone marksman? Siddiq Umar, a national record breaker from the remote area of Karak near North Waziristan, mustered up 578 points in the men's 10 metres air rifle qualification but finished way down at number 48 out of 51 contestants.

This was the same event in which India's Abhinav Bindra bagged a gold medal, that country's first such individual medal after the eight that its hockey team has gathered. Bindra was, in fact, fourth in the qualification round, but shot a score of 104.5 in the final taking his overall total to 700.5 that gave him the top position.

Six days later, Siddiq Umar took part in the 50 metres rifle 3 positions qualification. In the three rounds, he made a score of 1116, which was far below the man who came first, Slovenia's Rajmond Debevec with 1176. Debevec, however, missed the gold medal in the final which went to China's Jian Qiu. With one contestant failing to start, Siddiq finished 49th and last in a field of 49.

IS IT BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD?

Pakistan sports have needed to get back to the drawing board after the end of every international event over the sixty-one years since Independence. And that's a real pity. Cricket is always judged by a different yardstick, but hockey and squash too have brought the country an unprecedented procession of laurels over the past several years. International recognition has, however, now almost vanished.

At Beijing earlier this month, a sense of national pride in fact evaporated soon after the team's march past at the exhilarating opening ceremony of the Olympic Games. The nattily dressed contingent, in its traditional green blazers and white trousers with hockey captain Zeeshan Ashraf carrying the national flag, was perhaps the only instance which touched the souls of the television viewers back home. From there onwards, everything regarding Pakistan was downhill.

The hockey loss at the hands of New Zealand was the unkindest cut of all. The 'Black Sticks' too haven't made it to next year's Champions Trophy but for Pakistan it would be one tournament less to reassert their authority in the field of hockey, if they can start the process soon enough. The next assignment is a bilateral series against neighbours India. The latter, however, were missing from the Olympic Games for the first time in eighty years. The most successful team in the Olympics hockey history had simply failed to qualify!

Where does Pakistan go from here in the realm of sports? The standards are not going to register a massive raise all by themselves. Constant international exposure at the highest level should be the key. Let's get back to the Indo-Pakistan athletics meets concept again and it should be in our interest not to get delirious about our medal hauls at the various South Asian Games level. In a larger international concept, it doesn't mean a thing.

The organisers of sports and the management of the POA, PSB and PHF etc will certainly turn around and say that much is already being done for the promotion of sports. But we don't allow our sportspeople to rise from their roots; we try to make them take the plunge into big events without they being quite ready for them.

The plight of most medium and developing country could be the same as Pakistan's. Agreed. But sports even for these nations are first a matter of pride and then anything beyond that. Afghanistan won its first Olympics bronze medal the other day. Little known Togo picked up a bronze in canoeing. India have got a gold and a bronze and another medal was on its way. Netherlands Antilles took silver in the 200 metres men's final, just behind the magnificent Usain Bolt.

A woman from Thailand bagged a weightlifting gold. The girls from Jamaica have dominated the sprints and the hurdles. Zimbabwe's Kirsty Coventry has taken four medals in swimming -- a gold and three silvers.

Ethiopia and Kenya had bagged two gold medals each by mid-day on Thursday, Mongolia has got a gold medal and so has Bahrain. So have Panama and Tunisia. Several other countries seem to be coming up in the world of sports. Many are quite like Pakistan in many ways. Why can't we raise our heads and learn to live with more (sporting) dignity?

We should learn by the example of the Peoples Republic of China. They are surely one of the fastest emerging superpowers of the world. In the Beijing Olympic Games, with three days still to go on Thursday before they close on Sunday (today), China have overtaken United States in the medals haul already... for the first time in Olympics history!

The writer is Group Editor Sports of 'The News'

gulhbhatti@hotmail.com

bhatti.gulhameed@gmail.com

PAKISTAN AT 2008 OLYMPIC GAMES: ALL RESULTS

ATHLETICS

100 metres (women): Round 1 heat 2 Sadaf Siddiqui 12.41 seconds 7th out of 8 (ranked 61st overall out of 85)

110 metres hurdles: Round 1 heat 3 Abdul Rasheed 14.52 seconds 8th out of 8 (ranked 40th overall out of 40)

HOCKEY

Preliminary Pool B: Pakistan lost to Great Britain 4-2 (half-time 3-0), beat Canada 3-1 (h-t Canada 1-0), lost to Australia 3-1 (h-t 1-1), beat South Africa 3-1 (h-t 1-1), lost to Netherlands 4-2 (h-t Pakistan 1-0). Pakistan finished 4th in Pool B after Netherlands, Australia and Great Britain played 5, won 2, lost 3, goals for 11, goals against 13, points 6. Classification match for seventh and eighth place Pakistan lost to New Zealand 4-2 (h-t New Zealand 1-0). Pakistan finished 8th out of 12 teams

SHOOTING

Men's 10m air rifle qualification: Siddiq Umar 95/96/95/97/98/97=score 578 48th out of 51, didn't qualify for final

Men's 50m rifle 3 positions qualification: Siddiq Umar 390/359/367=score 1116 49th out of 49, didn't qualify for final

SWIMMING

50m freestyle: Heat 5 Adil Baig 25.66 seconds 7th out of 8 (ranked 74th overall out of 97)

50m freestyle (women): Heat 4 Kiran Khan 29.84 seconds 6th out of 8 (ranked 69th overall out of 90)

PAKISTAN DID NOT WIN A MEDAL

Courtesy: The News Pakistan