International Hockey Federation received a letter from Hockey India alleging that the London police questioning India’s midfielder Sardar Singh before the match against Pakistan in the recently concluded Hockey World League Semi-final was an attempt at match-fixing.
Just a day before India vs Pakistan group game, former captain Sardar Singh was summoned by a police station in Leeds after a British Indian Hockey player, Ashpal Bhogal filed a complaint against him in India last year. Hockey India in the letter to FIH CEO, Jason McCracken have said that complaint and questioning was an attempt to affect the player’s performance in the game. Sardar Singh had to skip practice as he had to travel a long distance and this also influenced his performance against Pakistan.
“Everyone is aware that cases of match-fixing in cricket have taken place in England concerning Pakistan matches…now if this plague has decided to spread its way into hockey by adopting a route of bogus criminal complaint and making teams play with less number of players or tired players…then it is a serious issue,” the letter said.
Indian manager Jugraj Singh also made an incident report on this and made this fact clear that this incident affected Sardar Singh badly.
Jugraj said, “The effect of [the incident] can be very well seen on Sardar Singh by sitting in cramped position for 11 hours both ways in a car and 4 hours of sitting on a chair for questioning. We had to make Sardar not play in the match against Holland for almost 70 percent of the time due to stiffness of the body. It may be noted here that Sardar Singh is the main playmaker of the Indian team.”
“The incident affected the morale of the Indian team and the team lost focus & purpose and the performance of the team can be seen in matches which happened after the incident of Sardar Singh. The team lost against Holland the next day and also lost against Malaysia & Canada (both lower ranked than India) and before the incident, the Indian team had won all 3 pool matches,” he added.