‘He understood a player the best’
It is a very sad day for Indian hockey, both MK Kaushik Sir and Ravinder Pal Singh Sir have made great contributions to the game.
I cried a lot when I got the news from Harendra Singh about Kaushik sir. He was a thorough gentleman, down to earth, very humble. It was shocking because I remember Dec 19, 1998, the way he was enjoying the victory; he ran with us holding the Indian flag. He was a person who understood a player more than anyone else. He gave freedom to senior players in the 1998 Asian Games—goalkeeper Ashish Ballal, full back Dilip Tirkey, Mohd Riaz, Sabu Varkey, Baljit Singh Saini, in the forwardline Mukesh and I were handling.
He had a lot of faith in players. And also in 1998 some players were in decline, like me, Ashish Balal, Mukesh. He fought with the Indian Hockey Federation that “I need all these players if you want the gold medal”.
I remember, during the preparation camp senior players and coaches used to have a meeting every night at 9 pm at MP Ganesh’s house in Bangalore. Ganesh was deputy director at SAI, Bangalore; after dinner we would plan for the next day, what kind of practice we need to do, how to beat South Korea, Pakistan, Japan. 2000 Sydney Olympics also.
I enjoyed that Asian Games more because there were no likes or dislikes in the team. He handled it very well, we had a lot of fun.
Another important decision he made was to invite Merwyn Fernandes for the national camp. They had played together, Merwyn was right-in, Kaushik bhai was right-out. He knew Merwyn had a lot of ideas, lot of game planning. We benefitted a lot from that also. the line but how he keeps the ball inside and runs. I have all these memories of him.