Can UK Hockey now get the recognition it deserves? Guest blog by Worksop Ladies Hockey Club!
(Original Source of Article: Worksop Ladies Hockey Club)
National Stars
It seems like a lifetime ago that I watched the 2012 Champions Trophy in Rosario, Argentina. Back then, it was a struggle to find the matches online. I was jealous of the passion that the Argentinians had for my beloved game. The stadium was packed to the rafters like I’d never seen at a hockey match before. I wanted that for us. I wanted our country to have the same passion as the South Americans.
Their hockey players are national stars. They’re always on TV, they even host their own shows, and the most famous of them all, Luciana Aymar, is one of the most recognisable sports stars in the country. The difference between the game over there and over here was literally worlds apart.
Even though GB claimed a silver in that balmy Rosario atmosphere, little was heard of it outside of hockey circles. The average person on the street wouldn’t recognise a GB player if they walked past them. It was sad, and also hard to see how we could come close to bringing our sport to similar heights.
However, beavering away in the background, England Hockey, Sport England, UK Sport and the National Lottery were slowly starting to change the shape of the game.
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London Legacy
London 2012 was a massive turning point for hockey, and sport in general. Great Britain’s athletes completed their most successful Olympics and Great Britain’s hockey women won a bronze medal on their home soil. The seeds of this success had been planted a few years earlier by the aforementioned organisations and this rolling stone’s momentum was starting to pay dividends.
The success of London 2012 was a great boost to hockey with an estimated 30,000 people taking up the sport following the Games.
The GB hockey team reverted to England for the 2013 World hockey league, and the momentum was still there, with England gaining another bronze medal, beating the hosts, Argentina, in a shootout. However, 2014 was a year that would be the turning point for our hockey fortunes, and the first big event of the year, the Hockey World Cup was where the bubble burst. England finished a disastrous 11th out of 12 after finishing bottom of their pool. It seemed that all that wonderful momentum had suddenly come to a halt.
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I remember, at the time, feeling that our Olympic legacy was fizzling out and that hockey was in recession. There’s always going to be a hard core of hockey enthusiasts that will keep the game alive, but I wanted more. I wanted what the Argentinian’s had.
Seven weeks after the World Cup they went to the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow and against all odds won the silver medal. And it could have so easily been gold, with England 1-0 ahead with just 8 seconds to go, the Australians equalised and went on to win the shootout.
TV Coverage
The one noticeable difference to the silver they won back in Rosario 30 months earlier was the TV coverage. Hockey had started to get a lot more coverage, with the BBC and BT sport championing live coverage of all of our games.
It was also announced that England were to host some prestigious events over the coming years, with the European Championships in 2015, the Champion’s Trophy in 2016, the Men’s World League Semi-Final in 2017 and the Hockey World Cup in 2018.
It seemed like the phoenix had risen from the ashes and when England became European Champions in 2015 and the media coverage started to get more intense. On a worldwide sports scale the Hockey Euros were still small potatoes, but when the girls became Olympic Champions in 2016, hockey well and truly exploded into the limelight. It’s safe to say that not all of the 9 million people who watched that night were hockey fans up to that point.
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