Honored to feature this wonderful player, person, and representative of the game and country.
The ‘midfield’ is orphaned and the ‘forward line’ lonely, I murmured long into the eerie silence of my night as India bowed out of the world cup via sudden death.
I tried dipping my muddy biscuits into the greasy night of loneliness and helplessness, ruffling and muffling between contemplating what’s required to smile vs. not knowing what it takes to lead life ahead. Sport, they say, is the ‘active flow of emotion and patience. And field hockey, managing discipline. Sometimes, a successful team is like building a good business and entrepreneurship. And, in the planning stages of any enterprise, it is essential to test the market than to endeavor to meet their sudden desires since they’re prone to altering their minds.
The growth should not be excessively rigid; it should be simple to follow and reproducible so that it can be amended swiftly if certain players do not show up as anticipated. As a result, it is all about using more straightforward methods and imparting constant learning rather than following a complex structure.
For India, the 2023 FIH Hockey World Cup in Rourkela and Bhubaneswar is about putting those simplest things on a sound pedestal again. But, we failed and faltered in the most unusual stage – the pre-quarterfinal. An apparent absence in the forward line will hurt me the most, yet we ignored the midfield. And now, the team will go back to Rourkela for the 9-12th classification matches. Again, there’s an emergency in the midfield, and now, the Indian team will be going to an area that produced the state’s first field hockey player – Peter Tirkey.
Peter Tirkey was the first hockey player from Odisha to play for India – in the 1982 Junior World Cup, Kuala Lumpur. In 1982, India juniors drew vs. West Germany, lost vs. Australia, and won their games vs . Canada, Singapore, and Kenya. Then, they beat Spain in the crossovers and the Netherlands 3-2 to finish fifth. A full-back from Rasrajpur in Sundargarh district, Sr. Tirkey was a regular member of the senior national camp from 1981 to 1984 and narrowly missed the Los Angeles flight in 1984 but played in the nationals till 1991.
In hockey, one of the primary responsibilities of a full-back is to block an opposing forward and prevent the ball from going to the goaltender. In a successful defensive stop scenario, the ball will be returned to the opposite side, facilitating the scoring opportunities of midfielders and forwards. And Peter Tirkey has achieved this to perfection.
Odisha, as a state, takes pride in its two state-of-the-art hockey stadiums in Rourkela and Bhubaneswar. It has produced nearly twenty internationals, i.e., Jyoti Sunita Kullu, Deep Grace Ekka, Sunita Lakra, Punam Barla, Binita Toppo, Dilip Tirkey, Ignace Tirkey, Prabodh Tirkey, Amit Rohidas, Birendra Lakra, and Nilam Sanjeep Xess, etc. But none will be more memorable and important than Sr. Tirkey himself.
He may have dropped out of high school to support his family, but he had already represented his school in some inter-school tournaments. A place in the state sub-junior team followed, and then he raised the ranks to the nationals. An employee of the Rourkela Steel Plant, Sr. Tirkey kept his passion for hockey burning despite missing out on wearing an India jersey.
Michael Kindo, a legendary full-back and Olympic bronze medalist from the same region as Sr. Tirkey advised him to take up coaching, and he never looked back from then. As a junior and senior coach, Peter Tirkey produced as many as eleven Indian international players. One of his students is Birendra Lakra, a bronze medalist at the Tokyo Olympics. His other student Shilanand Lakra has a bronze and a silver medal at the Sultan of Johor Cup in Malaysia (2017 and 2019) and a bronze from the 2021 Men’s Asian Champions Trophy in Dhaka. In that 2019 edition, Shilanand was the top scorer with five goals.
With the genius of Peter Tirkey, a goalkeeper ‘chief minister’ and a full-back ‘president’ at the helm of things, I am confident; Odisha will produce many talented players, and Indian Hockey will only rise high. What I wish to see going forward for every district and state hockey association in India is to put the simplest of things on a sound pedestal. Instead of overbeating and boasting on success stories and social media celebrations, start falling in love with hockey, the beautiful game.
At the end of the day and time, we know our hockey is cute, adorable, funny, intimidating, emotional, and eternally immortal.
