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.

The dream died quickly, with reasons ranging from selection politics to players losing motivation to go on. The drag-flicker’s jinx hurts more than Indian cricket’s dearth of pace bowlers did not too long ago. Hockey seems to have tried it all. And yet lost.

No quick-fix

It was only a year ago that Indian cricket was facing its sternest and prickliest posers after exiting the World Cup. There was redemption within six months in the form of Twenty20.

Unfortunately for the stick-men, there’s no quickie-hockey to salvage their sport’s own melancholic March.

When India’s Olympic contingent walks the opening ceremony on 8/8/08, it will have shrunk dramatically from Athens — hockey’s 16 missing from the celebratory march-past. Only 23 Indians have qualified otherwise — there were 76 four years ago. And from the quibbling that has been going on in another key discipline — tennis — India’s non-cricket sports seem to be on the path to self-destruct.

Hockey has let go off its only opportunity in four years to grab the eye-balls. And sadly, Indian sports’ most impressionable minds — those under-25, born after 1980 — will have grown up not knowing what an Olympic gold medal is at all. That’s a generation of admirers lost.

The street-wise clincher: SRK’s IPL cricket team is a fact, his Chak De seems mere pop fiction now. Don’t blame the Wankede for nudging out the BHA.