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‘Masterji’ developed his own unconventional coaching methods to train the players – cross-country runs and swimming at canals during the freezing January mornings, and the hostel libraries would be stacked with sports magazines, where players would be urged to read about Shamsher’s favourite player, Lionel Messi. “’What will a Hindi teacher do on a hockey field’, they asked. Shamsher was mocked and ridiculed by the senior players. But they just told me to reach the hockey ground at 4.30-5 am and spend a couple of hours.” “It didn’t make sense and I protested, saying I did not have any coaching skills or hockey experience. “Since I used to run a bit and play a little volleyball, it was suggested that I should oversee hockey training,” Shamsher says. (Hockey India)Ī player exodus followed and the school authorities feared they would not be able to hold on to the ground. Abhishek started playing hockey to a ground near his home in Sonepat. But around 2006, the government scheme which kept the hockey activities at the school going was discontinued and soon after, the coaches moved on. Since 1988, he had been the hostel guardian and a Hindi teacher of the school that had produced several hockey players, including former India international Rajesh Chauhan.
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Shamsher, after all, had never even touched a hockey stick before he was thrust upon the responsibility to teach the sport. “Ultimately, only on my say-so, they agreed.” “I gave his parents my word that Abhishek would be under my strict observation for 24 hours,” says Shamsher, Abhishek’s childhood hockey coach. And that’s how the now 22-year-old, against his parents’ wishes, left a strict, reputed public school to join an institution that did not have a great disciplinary record but had a decent hockey structure, which was overseen not by a qualified coach but a Hindi teacher, Shamsher Singh. That’s how the younger of the two sons of an Army man started playing hockey in the first place – following his friend to a ground near his home in Sonepat, the Haryana district growing in reputation for producing top-level international players. Until then, he was a happy-go-lucky young man, never far away from mischief and someone who did things not because he wanted to, but because his friends did them.
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It’s been 10 years since the accident, which Abhishek, described by his coach as a player in the mould of Pakistan great Shahbaz Ahmad, calls the ‘turning point’ of his life. “This is my second shot at life.” Ten years ago, Abhishesk suffered an injury and was in the ICU for two weeks. Mar jaata wahan,” the India forward, set to make his maiden Commonwealth Games appearance, says. It took an operation, 15 stitches and a week in the ICU to fix a couple of nerves that got severely damaged.