The Sunday Mail
The Art of Sport
Arthur Choga
TODAY, the country hosts the Zimbabwe vs Zambia Development Hockey Series at St John’s Educational Trust Astro Turf in Borrowdale, Harare.
The series, which features 388 talented hockey players, has been billed as a celebration of the sport and an incubator of future stars.
The event will feature six international games.
Fifty coaches and managers are in attendance.
By the end of the series, teams will have played 33 matches.
Hockey will always have a special place in the history of local sport.
In 1980, women’s field hockey was introduced at the Olympics — held in Moscow, in the old Soviet Union (now Russia) — for the first time, and the Zimbabwe women’s national field hockey team won gold at that event.
The squad of 16 women was assembled less than a month before the Olympics began to help fill gaps the American-led Olympic boycott created in the women’s hockey competition.
The team members were Arlene Boxall, Liz Chase (vice captain), Sandra Chick, Gillian Cowley, Patricia Davies, Sarah English, Maureen George, Ann Grant (captain), Susan Huggett, Patricia McKillop, Brenda Phillips, Christine Prinsloo, Sonia Robertson, Anthea Stewart, Helen Volk and Linda Watson.
Zimbabwe’s three wins and two draws in the round-robin tournament were remarkable, especially considering the team’s lack of preparation and experience.
Won at a time of great political transition in Zimbabwe, the gold medal was the country’s first Olympic medal of any colour.
From then on, the team was known as “The Golden Girls”.
The 1980 Olympics were first to feature Zimbabwe under the new name, coming as they did just a few months after the country celebrated independence on April 18.
The country had been barred from the previous three Olympics for political reasons.
It had last competed as Rhodesia in 1964.
The women’s hockey matches, held between July 25 and 31, were all played on artificial turf, which none of the Zimbabwean team members had ever seen before.
They had also never played together until that month.
After beating Poland and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), and drawing with Czechoslovakia and India, the Zimbabweans won the competition on the final day by 4-1 over Austria.
Notably, the team was made up of some bank officials, secretaries, teachers and bookkeepers. One of the players was even listed as a housewife.
The oldest member of that team, Stewart, who was 35, doubled as the coach.
The youngest was goalkeeper Boxall, who was 18 years old.
At the 1995 All-Africa Games that Zimbabwe hosted, and for which the country built two new purpose-made fields from scratch (one at Khumalo in Bulawayo and the other at the National Sports Stadium), the women’s team won a silver medal.
The two stadia are not in use today but the basic infrastructure still exists.
National team games taking place at school facilities speak directly to an urgent need for a sports infrastructure strategy for the country to ensure that, even as associations, schools and individuals invest effort and resources into developing the various sports in the country, there is an all-encompassing and deliberate drive to develop and upgrade the country’s sporting facilities.
The levels of interest in the sport makes it vital to devote resources to it.
One of the basics of becoming a sporting powerhouse is identifying sports you excel in as a nation and pursuing them with vigour.
In an earlier article, I talked about how Sri Lanka and India do not lose sleep when their national football teams underperform, but take a major interest in the fortunes of their cricket teams.
Hockey has an advantage in that the basic infrastructure is already there.
In my younger days, we used to see a young man by the name of Denim Mutandwa in Mbare, who played hockey for the Eradicators team set up by Custom Kachambwa.
The team included stars like Alec Isulu, Mutandwa, Jeremiah Matibiri, Erasmus Hodza, Nathan Sundayi, Emmanuel Malvas, Cletos Paraziva, Adam Ngoma, Wellington Ngoma, Duncan Donkeni and Anthony Fyfe.
Eradicators played a part in bringing the game to black players and had a following in high-density areas, in much the same way Takashinga did for cricket.
The current series and recent performances by junior and senior hockey teams, both male and female, bring back a sense of expectation in the sport.
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