Paddy’s field work: Blending Indian hockey’s silent and aggressive warriors, defanging opponents into shirt colours & brainstorming in Hindi | Hockey News

Paddy Upton relies on the simplest of techniques to declutter the most complex of subjects.To take away the fear – or complacency – he is training India’s hockey stars to look at their opponents merely as coloured shirts, thus stripping the players of their aura.
To deal with the different, clashing personalities within the dressing room, he has bracketed them into two categories: the silent warriors and the ultra-aggressive warriors. Or, as he puts it, the KL Rahuls and the Virat Kohlis.
And to define the ‘Indian style’, he falls back on an idiot-proof analogy. “Just go drive on a road in Mumbai and go drive in Belgium. You see a massive difference,” says the South African mind master, who joined the Indian hockey team’s backroom staff this year. “One is unstructured and the other is absolutely disciplined and structured. And both ways are very good.”
Skillful and fit as they are, this chaos often shows not only in the players’ body language but also reflects in their minds inevitably in pressure situations – the mindless tackle leading to a card, the inexplicable pass to concede possession, the defensive blunder resulting in a goal.
The pattern has played out in a loop – the 2018 Asian Games semifinal, the World Cup quarterfinal that year, the 2020 Olympics last-four stage, the World Cup quarterfinal again this year… and this is just the last five years.
“I was very intrigued the, sort of, macro story of Indian hockey,” Upton, whose contract was till the Asian Games and is likely to return for the Paris Olympics, tells The Indian Express. “And I see there’s a real upswing in terms of Indian hockey on a global scale in the last 10-12 years.”(Hockey India)
The repeated brain fades have ended careers of some players and cost the coaches their jobs. Before he left India, the last coach to be shown the door, Graham Reid, underlined the need to have a full-time psycholog with the team, suggesting that the issue might not be so much technical or tactical but in the players’ minds.
For once, Hockey India lened to the advice and in came Upton, whose reputation of being a key member of Gary Kirsten’s coaching staff during the Indian cricket team’s triumphant 2011 World Cup campaign precedes him.

India have engaged a sports psycholog in the past when, in 2018, the players began to consult the mental trainer attached to the Sports Authority of India Bangalore centre, where they train. But this is the first time they have a full-time mental conditioning coach, who also travels with them.
“I was very intrigued the, sort of, macro story of Indian hockey,” Upton, whose contract was till the Asian Games and is likely to return for the Paris Olympics, tells The Indian Express. “And I see there’s a real upswing in terms of Indian hockey on a global scale in the last 10-12 years.”
There isn’t a bigger proof of that than the return to the Olympic podium after four decades as well as a dominant return to the top of the podium at the Asian Games in Hangzhou.

It is worth having a conversation about ‘mental toughness’.It is currently the most overused and least understood concept in sports psychology.I neither agree with nor use this term. pic.twitter.com/I6zdOPInkD
— Paddy Upton (@PaddyUpton1) October 5, 2023
Yet, the world of Indian hockey isn’t for the faint-hearted. It’s a real-life Big Boss show, with the players living inside a sports campus all year round, taking part in daily challenges and being judged every second. Sustained poor runs and an eviction follows.
It’s a ruthless universe where every man has to fend for himself. SV Sunil, the former India attacker who survived and thrived in this unique atmosphere for more than a decade, puts it in context.
“The first level of pressure is to get into the national camp. Once you are there, there’s pressure to impress the coach because that’s how you can get into the team. Once you are in, the pressure is to maintain that consent high level. For that, at tournaments, you deal with the pressure to perform because that’s where it’ll be seen if you are good enough. Then, there are external factors – media, federation, coach. And lastly, there is the family pressure because the financial situation of most hockey players isn’t that great. If you play well, then you can earn something,” Sunil tells this paper.
“Not your conventional training day with the India Men’s Hockey team. Then again, FUN is a key factor in our quest for Asia Games, then Olympic Games gold. A day of Movie Making followed Bollywood Awards ceremony,” Paddy Upton posted this caption on X along with the Indian hockey team. (X/Paddy Upton)
And then, there’s the hory of cliques within the dressing room.
Upton is conscious of the pressures and the challenges of dealing with the ‘mental side of the game, which is a very personal place where you start to have conversations around some vulnerabilities and insecurities.’
So, rather than being thrust upon the players, his initiation to the team was slow. Oftentimes during the Asian Champions Trophy, Upton’s first tournament with the team, he was seen in the dugout during matches and training observing from a dance and taking notes.

This, he says, was crucial early to ensure there was no resance from the players and done with the help of coach Craig Fulton and captain Harmanpreet Singh.
“Probably the thing that helped the most was Craig Fulton realising that this must be a gentle, slow introduction. He allowed me to spend time with a team, just being around the players, building relationships, building connections. Not bringing anything in too quickly or too suddenly, but to allow a very gradual entry and allow me to become familiar with the players and get familiar with hockey in India,” Upton says.
“And same with Harmanpreet, he allowed me to have a very gentle and gradual entry. So, there wasn’t anything that I was asked to do, or that I did that would have gotten people’s resance or barriers up. They didn’t invite me, for example, to run a workshop on the mental side of the game on the third day that I was there. They allowed us to take a medium-to-long-term view, which was very, very smart.”
Upton, who was approached Fulton when he was with Ireland and Belgium but refused on both occasions, agreed to come to India because he understood the mentality through his 15-year association with the country in different roles.
He dug into his past experiences of working with the cricket team to study the personalities inside the dressing room and chart his plan around that.
“If you just look at a Virat Kohli and KL Rahul, those are two massively different characters. Or a Kohli and Dhoni. Very, very different ways but there is something unique within the DNA,” Upton says. “Even in the hockey team, you’ve got some very mild-natured people, and you’ve got some real aggressive competitive warriors. And I’ve been fortunate to understand some of those nuances between your quiet warrior and your ultra-competitive, fierce warriors.”
Running patterns of play
Upton doesn’t get into the specifics. But he gives an overview of the similarities and differences of working with the players who are a part of India’s two biggest team sports.
With the cricket team, he says, the focus was more on the individual. “We are addressing the same issues except in the cricket team, it was specific with cricket being more of an individual game. The big difference between cricket and hockey is hockey, you have to run patterns of play in combinations of defenders, midfielders and forwards.
“There’s much more coordination required between players in hockey than in cricket. So there needs to be an understanding in those units whereas in cricket, a player only really needs to have an understanding of his own game. So that’s the one difference.”
The other, bigger, difference, Upton points out, is the language. Unlike the cricket side, hockey is ‘largely a Hindi-speaking team’, he adds. “The only English that’s spoken really is the English-speaking coaches. So my approach has been, can I get the players to be speaking as much Hindi as possible? And so, I’m using quite a different approach with a hockey team than I was with the cricket team.”
During the group sessions, Upton says he asks the players a series of questions and tries to stimulate a conversation. (X/Paddy Upton)
During the group sessions, Upton says he asks the players a series of questions and tries to stimulate a conversation. “A very practical example: Instead of telling players how to go about playing in a final, I would ask them what mindset is required; what are the most important things to get right; what are the makes commonly made.
“And I would have players discuss it amongst themselves in small groups, and then change the groups and have an extensive conversation where the players bring their thinking, their knowledge, their understanding of what is the smartest thing to do. I would have coaches also discuss what they had seen from a coaching perspective, I would also be part of those conversations. The answers would all be in Hindi because it’s a largely Hindi-speaking team compared to cricket.”
It’ll be worth being a fly on the wall during those conversations because the team tends to have mood swings beyond anyone’s comprehension. On their day, India can beat the best of the sides. On other occasions, they’ll lose to a minnow.
Against countries ranked close to or lower than them, Harmanpreet has suggested the team sometimes gets complacent. When they play a stronger opponent, like Australia or Belgium, in marquee events, there’s a tendency to get overwhelmed.

“That’s something that we are turning around with the Indian team,” he says. “Regardless of who we play, we play our own brand of hockey. One of the ways that you do that is you look at the opponent as the colour of the shirt.
“So, we are playing the guys playing green shirts today, or the blue or the orange or the yellow shirts. It’s just a different colour shirt which you are playing; not that we play Belgium or Pakan. We just understand how they play, but we keep coming back to play our brand of hockey. And that’s what was beautifully demonstrated in Hangzhou where we were less influenced who the opponents were.”
It’s a mental technique Fulton and Harmanpreet bought into, he says; the ‘smart’ coach-captain duo who are plotting a return to the podium next year in Paris.
“Craig Fulton is very organized, very structured, very, very impressive as a coach and a leader. And Harmanpreet is a very smart operator. The two of them are very much on the same page,” he says. “There’s a clear strategy of building the kind of team that is going to have a very good chance of winning an Olympic gold. (Although) There’s no guarantee. So, it’s more continuation of the journey that has already been set off some smart leaders.”
Upton makes it sound straightforward. But that’s what he does – making the complex simple.