BHUBANESWAR: Former Indian hockey captain
Sardar Singh made a startling revelation on Saturday, blaming India's high-performance director David Ian John and former Indian men's hockey team's chief coach
Marijne Sjoerd
- who is presently the women's team head - for creating circumstances which forced him to announce his early retirement.
Giving inside details of what transpired behind closed doors in the months leading up to his retirement for the very first time since calling it quits in September this year, Sardar informed that both John and Sjoerd resorted to a lot of chopping and changing in the team, rotating and even dropping the senior players, including him, at their own free will.
Sardar said that things changed drastically for him after the exit of
Roelant Oltmans
despite the midfielder from Haryana being the fittest of the lot. Giving one such instance, Sardar revealed, "During last year's (October) Asia Cup in Dhaka, on the day of our match against Pakistan (in the Super Four which India won 4-0), John called me to his hotel room in the morning and told me I was playing individualistic hockey and not creating enough chances for the team. A coach can't do that to a player telling him just hours before an important match that you are not playing well. There's a time and place for such talks, may be after the match."
The world knows, as Sardar chose to tell them, that it was entirely his decision to quit international hockey after a disappointing outing at the Asiad. But Sardar, who has 314 international caps for India and retired after Jakarta Asian Games where India settled for bronze after losing to Malaysia in a penalty shootout in the semifinals, revealed that John and Sjoerd started neglecting him on the pretext of picking him for the next big tournament. That big occasion rarely came after the Asia Cup.
Sardar was dropped for the Hockey World League Final in Bhubaneswar in December. Later, he was selected for the
Sultan Azlan Shah Cup as a captain, but that team largely consisted of junior players with no senior around. Then again, he was dropped for the Gold Coast CWG. Finally, after the Asiad in September, he wasn't selected for the 25-member core group for the Asian Champions Trophy, which forced Sardar to retire.
"After Oltmans, several things changed for me and the seniors with John and Sjoerd around. I was missing important tournaments. I hoped to get back into the team someday, but on the pretext that I was not fit, they kept dropping me. Honestly, you can't play under such circumstances.
"I am still fit to play the upcoming World Cup and the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. My fitness is still good. I scored the highest on the Yo-Yo test parameter. The same John had once told me in Bengaluru that you re the fittest player around. My target is to keep myself fit for next two years to play in different leagues globally," Sardar said with a sense of despondency and hurt.
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