“Hockey was once a national game and pastime andḥockey matches were watched with the greatest interest, but alas! not now.”
Some weeks ago, I watched a hockey match in Lahore. It was played between the Lions’ Club and our college. It was quite an interesting match. The match started in the afternoon at 4 on one of the grounds of the main stadium of the city. Hundreds of students of our college and outsiders had come to watch it. Everyone was feeling happy, hopeful and excited. When the match started, the students started clapping and shouting in joy. The two teams were playing with great effort. The right-out of our team pushed the ball close to the other team’s goal. He passed the ball on to the right-in. The right-in ran forward and pushed it into the goal. So our team against the other scored the first goal. Now the other team started its attacks on our team with greater force. Its players came with the ball quite close to our goal several times. But our players pushed them back. There was a very tough fight between the two teams for a goal.[the_ad id=”17141″]
It continued until the interval. After the interval, the other team started making fresh efforts to score a goal against our team. Within a few minutes, something very unfortunate (unlucky) happened. Our center-forward and left-half got injured. One of them fell very badly while running after the ball. The other was hit on the head by the ball. So other boys had to be brought in in place of the injured centre-forward and left-half.
Our team was feeling a little tired which was quite natural in the tough competitive situation. The new centre-forward and left-half of our team, to say the truth, were not so fine players. The result was that the other team began advancing towards our goal. It scored three goals against us one after another. Our team lost the above match. We lost it because of the injury of our two main players. The other team was as good as ours, and really played very well. We decided with the other team to play a fresh match on their ground within two months’ time.
