The Night the Families Finally Got to Watch: Harmanpreet’s Father Sees His Son Play Live for the First Time
Thirteen goals, and the story that stayed with people wasn’t any of them. It was in the stands.
Sarabjit Singh had never watched his son play live. Not once. Harmanpreet Singh has played more than 250 internationals for India, captained his country, and won medals at the Olympics and the Asian Games, and his father had seen all of it from a distance. On Tuesday night in Jalandhar, that finally changed.
Sarabjit had a kidney transplant last year. He wasn’t going to miss this one. He’d dropped a young Harmanpreet off at the Surjit Hockey Academy years ago, back when it was just a kid with a stick and a long road ahead. On Tuesday he watched that kid walk out as India’s captain, at the same city’s stadium, in front of a full house, for the first international match Punjab has hosted in 17 years.
Harmanpreet looked up to the stands before the game and waved to his father, his wife and his daughters. Then he went out and scored twice in a 13-0 win over Bangladesh.
He wasn’t the only father in the stands having a first. Ajit Singh, father of forward Sukhjeet Singh, was watching his son in India colours live for the first time too. Ajit is a former player himself, Punjab Police, and he gave Sukhjeet a cut-down hockey stick when the boy was about four. Sukhjeet’s road since then has been anything but smooth: partial paralysis after a needling treatment in 2018, doctors doubting he’d play again, and a long climb back to an India debut in 2022. His father watched him in Punjab, in an India shirt, at an international tournament. That’s a long way from a four-year-old with a short stick.
Manpreet Singh’s family were there too, even though Manpreet wasn’t. A calf injury in training ruled the former captain out of the tournament, and Vivek Sagar Prasad took his place in the squad. His wife and two daughters came anyway, to support the team and to be part of the night. His wife said she hoped he’d recover and get another chance to play in Punjab.
And Hardik Singh’s father, a Punjab Police officer on security duty for the chief minister, slipped back to the stands during the evening so his wife could photograph their son playing.
That’s what Tuesday was, underneath the scoreline. International hockey came back to Punjab, and the people who’d driven the players to academies, waited through injuries and watched from hundreds of miles away finally got to sit in the stands and watch it happen in front of them.
Today is a rest day at the Asian Champions Trophy. No games, no scorelines. The hockey comes back on Thursday, when India play China at 6:30pm PKT. The families will be back too, most likely. After a night like Tuesday, why wouldn’t they be?
Related links:
https://sportscursor.com/india-13-0-bangladesh-mandeep-hat-trick-asian-champions-trophy-27-october-2026/
https://sportscursor.com/india-v-china-asian-champions-trophy-thursday-29-october-2026/
https://sportscursor.com/asian-champions-trophy-2026-day-1-malaysia-china-japan-korea-india-bangladesh-27-october-2026/
https://sportscursor.com/live/
