‘To get friend in, hockey captain told a team mate: Don’t play well’
ABOUT FOUR years ago, when Sjoerd Marijne, then coach of the Indian men’s hockey team, picked a teenage player to represent India at the Commonwealth Games, he was convinced a new star had been discovered. However, when the player flopped in Gold Coast, Marijne was “deeply mystified”. At first, he thought it was because of the pressure of playing in a major tournament. But later, he says, he got to know that captain Manpreet Singh had allegedly told the player “to stop playing so well”.
The Dutchman, who was the coach of the men’s team before leading the women’s side to a historic fourth-place finish at the Olympics last year, has made this claim in his soon-to-be-released book titled Will Power. While the 200-odd page memoir dwells largely on the turnaround of the women’s team, Marijne...