Belgian Diamonds That Took A Decade To Polish!

It is easy to label Belgium’s victory as a fairytale or a miracle but that would be unfair. The triumph in Bhubaneswar, 7698 km away from Brussels, took the team a decade of planning, losing and persevering.

- Uthra Ganesan

On December 16, in front of an appreciat­ive, over­capacity crowd of 17,000 in the temple city of Bhubaneswar, Thomas Briels lifted the Hockey World Cup and walked into history books as the first Belgian to do so in any team sport.

Forty­eight hours later, the Red Lions were singing La Brabanconne, the Belgian national anthem, in the Brussels city square, with more than 6000 supporters cheering the team for its triumph in a sport that doesn’t rate anywhere near the top in the country.

It is easy to label Belgium’s victory as a fairytale or a miracle but that would be un­ fair. The triumph in Bhubaneswar, 7698 km away from Brussels, took the team a decade of planning, losing and persevering in what it felt was the best way to accomplish the ‘Be Gold’ programme that the Belgian hockey federation had ambitiously set out for itself in 2008.

The scale of things and nations apart, Belgium hockey’s golden decade — and coach Shane McLeod has warned this is not the end but just the beginning — has quite a few lessons for the Indian team, not the least of which happens to be an investment in the grassroots and faith in the system.

Indian and Belgian hockey have had different histories and trajectories in the last 10 years. Belgium won its only world­level medal at the 1920Olympics, a bronze, before the recent revival of the game. India, on the other hand, was long a powerhouse but slipped since the 1980 Olympics, falling down the rungs with the inability to qualify for the 2008 edition the nadir.