There are murmurs that Mumbai’s Wankhede Stadium, while preparing to host the 2011 Cricket World Cup final, will gobble up the adjoining astroturf of the Bombay Hockey Association — the city’s sole hockey premise. This spatial expansion apart, the timing of Indian hockey’s lowest low — within five days of cricket’s heady high in Australia — will not be lost on alarmists who believe that cricket will brazenly guzzle down beleagured hockey.

But does cricket really have to try anymore?

It is perhaps right that these doomsayers be given time and space to vent out their loudest, harshest cries of bereavement. For what India has lost in Chile deserves an official mourning period that goes beyond ruing the meek submission to Britain — mind you, also a cricketing nation of great pride.

Joaquim Carvalho’s men would not have hoped for open-top buses to greet them in Bangalore had they managed to qualify for the Olympics. But an India — high on winners and winning — is likely to accord its returning hockey-bunch something more lethal than criticism and contempt: four years of indifference.

It’s not so much about cricket unveiling its multi-million dollar IPL in a month’s time and catching the nation’s fancy: it is the sheer despair over hockey’s own city-based PHL staggering despite its audience-and-advertisement friendly innovations.

Neither is it about shrugging off this Santiago nightmare as an aberration, and pooling in all hopes into that dreamy illusion of youth setting it all right — sprightly youngsters, like the ones who stomp around confidently these days on cricket fields from Malaysia to Australia. Hockey has had its pristine youthful promise on a platter — the Junior World Cup champs of 2001.

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