The great wall: Meet Savita Punia, goalkeeper, Indian women's hockey team

In Punia, Vaibhav Raghunandan encounters a quiet strength that was unmissable in Tokyo

In her initial days at the national camp for the women’s hockey team, Savita Punia would never speak up. She’d merge into a group when forced to exchange pleasantries, just nod her head through training and put in blistering performances in high-pressure matches without uttering a word. M K Kaushik noticed this. And so, the coach and visionary, who subtly transformed much of Indian hockey into what it is today, told the “Great Wall of India” to take time off and, erm, talk to a wall till she could find the confidence to open up.

“What did I say to the wall?” Punia starts laughing uncontrollably. “Who talks to a wall? I said nothing, obviously. I just stood there, muted and embarrassed.” Gradually though, the importance of the lesson dawned on her. And while Punia isn’t exactly a talkative person even today in the niche of the women hockey team, she is its senior stalwart, its conscience and its memory, thanks to an Olympics unlike any before.

We are witnessing the ripple effect of success. Sitting in the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) officers' mess, a little over a month after the Tokyo Olympics, Punia talks about how it's been. She has in this past month attended over a dozen government functions and felicitations, made a guest appearance on an entertainment show, and given media interviews without abandon.

It is pouring in Delhi, the weekend kick-started by a shower out of nowhere. That meant a total change in plan. Punia was driving in from her hometown, Sirsa, for a felicitation by the CISF. The rain, as always, threw Delhi traffic into disarray and meant lunch became a snack, and eventually turned to coffee on the CISF campus.

The campus is beautiful and grand, and the officers’ mess has an open quadrangle to enjoy the evenings in. The few people milling about are the administrative staff. It is a combination of colonial architecture and tropical weather. Hemingway would’ve been thrilled. The tea (no sugar, skimmed milk) and the coffee (black, no sugar, weak) are served at exactly the time our interview is rescheduled for. The biscuits remain unattended, and you can understand why. Punia is headed back to the national camp in Bengaluru and dietary distractions aren’t really her thing.

She apologises for the change in plan, immediately confessing that she doesn’t actually like to eat out at all. She’s been like this since she was a child; no sugar cravings, junk food desires, #cheatday. She is a natural athlete, tall, lithe, lean and muscular. While in person she is soft-spoken and reticent, nothing about the way she carries herself displays any nervousness. This is a person comfortable with who she is, walls be damned.

Besides, for this girl from Jodhkan in Sirsa, walls have mostly existed to be broken through. Punia was born in patriarchy central, Haryana, but in a family that was uniquely progressive. “When I was born,” she says, “they say <ladoos> were distributed to the entire village. I was the second child, but I was never made to feel any different to my brother. If anything, I was pushed to do what I wanted more than anyone else.”

This demanded not just progressive thought but also a lot of sacrifice. Enrolled at the Maharaja Agrasain Girls School in Sirsa, it was here Punia was first introduced to hockey and a coach who saw in her the potential to become a goalkeeper. Her talent was obvious, her height (5 ft 8 inches) rare. Upon being told this, her father, Mohender, a pharmacist, immediately went and bought a goalkeeping kit worth ~18,000, a huge splurge for the family. “The moment he did that, I realised that now it was up to me,” Punia says. “Everyone was making sacrifices to see me play at the highest level — and I had to do the same.”

No one can doubt she has done it. Punia entered the India camp in 2008, at a time when Indian women’s hockey was an afterthought, covered in the margins of newspapers. Every member of that squad has retired now. It took her three years to make her debut and ever since she has been (barring injury or rotation) the first name on the team sheet. Over 200 games on, her desire and passion are still as strong — typified, perhaps, in the heart-breaking image of her crying inconsolably after India’s loss in the bronze playoff at the Olympics.

Indian sport is rife with stories of struggle, despair and personal ambition, and for the women, everything is magnified. Punia remembers her initial days in the national team as a massive jump in levels. Most of it had to do with fitness, an area where over the last few years, the players’ transition from elite to world-class elite has been astounding to watch.

The big change has been in the inculcation of sports science to tackle players' fitness and fatigue. Punia credits the team’s scientific advisor and strength and conditioning coach Wayne Lombard for almost all of it. “He deals with players individually. He understands each player's needs, the positional requirements and the way the coach wants to play, and then puts us through training.”

Punia also credits the mental conditioning the team has undergone for its performances in Tokyo. Last year, locked down in a training centre for months on end, there was danger of mental fatigue — more so when the Olympics were postponed. In addition, when it was actually time to play, the women lost their opening three matches, prompting immediate dismissal from most of the mainstream press and public. Through it all, though, the core unit, the 20-odd people who really mattered, stayed focused on the work at hand. And key among them was Janneke Schopman, the former Dutch captain who joined the women's team as an assistant to Sjoerd Marijne months before the pandemic struck.

Schopman’s bond and value to the players is immediately evident from the affection they display at the mention of her name. It helped that she had been an icon in the game in her playing career, but more than that her interpersonal coaching style, her instruction to players to introspect, communicate and be open about their mental health resonate with all. “Jan’s technique is to extract maximum from everyone, not just in the game but also outside of it. She wants to make sure we are all in a good space regardless of the result,” Punia says.

It is the talk-to-the-wall technique but a decade removed. Punia still fondly remembers Kaushik (who died in May this year after a complicated case of pneumonia) as the man who didn’t just take her game to the next level but also her character. “I will never forget. I think we had just come back from the Asia Cup,” she says. “It was one of my first tournaments, so my father had come to receive me at the airport. He took him aside and said, ‘She may have played well, but till she doesn’t start talking and opening up, she will not make any progress’.”

Goalkeepers are, traditionally, not just the renegades of a team (it takes a certain kind of madness, after all, to be ready to put your body in the way of a ball travelling at over 120 kmph) but also the directors of play. They see the game played out in front of them and so, have to call out the game. Punia admits she isn’t like the extrovert prankster P R Sreejesh, the men’s hockey goalkeeper, but now, at 31, as the oldest and most experienced player in the team, she is adequately vocal when necessary, helping the kids who have just walked in. Mostly though, she leaves them alone, to figure their own way around the maze because “everyone has a unique way”. Who would know that better than her?