A New League Starts Tomorrow in Raipur, and Sardar Singh Is Fronting It
India keeps inventing hockey leagues, and honestly, long may it continue. The newest one starts tomorrow night in Raipur, and it’s not a Delhi or Punjab production. It’s Chhattisgarh’s own.
The Chhattisgarh Hockey League is the state’s first official franchise league, put together by the state government’s Sports and Youth Welfare Department. Six teams, 132 players picked through trials, 18 matches, and a final on Sunday 1 November. Short, sharp, done in eleven days.
The opener, and who runs these teams
Rajdhani Royals v Nyayadhani Knights opens it on Thursday 22 October at 7:30 pm IST (7:00 pm PKT) at the Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel International Hockey Stadium in Raipur. The other four franchises are Bailadila Bulls, Sanskardhani Strikers, Chakradhar Champions and Mainpat Titans, each named for a slice of the state.
The coaching list tells you this isn’t a token effort. Rajinder Singh Jr coaches Mainpat, Devesh Chauhan takes Chakradhar, Ajitesh Roy has the Royals. The assistant coaches are deliberately picked from inside Chhattisgarh, which is the whole point of the thing: build the local pipeline, don’t just import a show.
The marquee names are real ones
Six Indian stalwarts headline the franchises as marquee players, including Olympians Surender Kumar, Pradeep Mor, SV Sunil, Lalit Kumar Upadhyay, Shamsher Singh and Chinglensana Singh Kangujam. That’s a serious dressing-room education for a triallist from a district side who’s suddenly sharing a bench with a man who’s played at the Olympics.
League ambassador Sardar Singh, who knows a thing or two about carrying a team, put it plainly: the squads are “well balanced with the perfect mix of experience and raw talent,” and he expects the state’s players to push on towards national and international level. “The eyes of the entire hockey fraternity are going to be on this league,” he said. That’s ambassador talk, but the structure backs some of it up.
How the eleven days run
League matches run nightly from 22 to 29 October, mostly two a night in Raipur, with a rest day on 30 October. The semi-finals are on Saturday 31 October, first against fourth and second against third, and the final is on Sunday 1 November at 7:00 pm IST.
For our money, this is exactly the layer Indian hockey needs more of. The national team conversation is all Hockey India League and internationals, but players don’t fall out of the sky into those squads. They come from rooms like this one, in states nobody writes about, playing in front of their own people. If even two or three of those 132 triallists end up in the national conversation, Raipur will have done its job. India’s senior game is in Jhansi tonight, by the way — here’s the Senior Nationals final preview — and every league we track sits on the Leagues page.
