The Hindu : Sport / Hockey : FIH's new mantra

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Feb 18, 2006

Sport

Sport - Hockey

FIH's new mantra

S. Thyagarajan

The federation is keen to give hockey a vibrant image to draw more media attention

Lausanne: Aggressive marketing. This is the mantra that the top brass in the International Hockey Federation now chant to give hockey a vibrant image to overcome the challenge it faces to draw enough media attention, particularly on the small screen.

While the progress achieved in the last few years, thanks to the initiative and drive formulated by a team of experts headed by the FIH president Els van Breda Vriessman, is encouraging and even inspiring at times, a lot of ground needs to be covered not only to keep the momentum, but to open new frontiers to chase established sports like soccer, F-1, golf and tennis. This is easier said than done because competitive hockey was not a professional sport till a few years ago — barring the Indian sub-continent and a few pockets in Europe like the Netherlands — and therefore the media did not pay much attention to hockey, except for events like the Olympic Games which came under a different package.

However, concerted efforts in the couple of years by the FIH Marketing and Media Committee have evoked some response even from international TV channels. The flying squad mode and its own free production clips have contributed to news agencies taking note of international events like the Champions Trophy and World Cup.

Landmark move

The tie-up with Ten Sports, based in Dubai, was a landmark in the endeavour to get hockey on the small screen for a period of four years.

Predictably, the FIH places enormous emphasis on reaching the audience in the Indian sub-continent and in West Asia, where a large number of Indians and Pakistanis live. Only a close and meticulous follow up helps programming the events. And the FIH is quite conscious of it. Frequent meetings and reviews, like the one that are in now on in this city, go a long way in formulating the guidelines as well as deciding on the events to be brought under television coverage.

Unlike in the past, the FIH is now flexible to evaluate changes that are possible. The experiment with the third umpire that was allowed for the recent Premier Hockey League in Chandigarh, and the new format of partitioning the match into four parts rather than two halves are definite indications to responding positively to constructive change. The break is designed to insert advertisements.

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail