By Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s hockey authorities have declined to confirm the national team will travel to India for next month’s Asian Champions Trophy, insisting any tour remains contingent on government approval — hours after a senior Indian politician suggested the fixture was already secured.
Mohyuddin Ahmed Wani, president of the Pakistan Hockey Federation (PHF), said on Monday that the team’s participation rested entirely with Islamabad, pushing back against comments made by Indian Punjab’s chief minister, Bhagwant Mann, who had told reporters Pakistan would be among the six nations competing in the tournament.
“The visit of the Pakistan team will depend on government clearance. We will do whatever the government asks us to do,” Wani, who also serves as federal secretary at the Ministry of Inter-Provincial Coordination, told the newspaper Dawn. He added that Mann’s remarks carried no weight over the federation’s own position.
Mann had claimed, in comments reported by the Press Trust of India, that clearance for Pakistan’s participation had already been secured, telling an event in Mohali: “There is no problem in multi-national tournaments. Maybe individual series [between India and Pakistan] cannot take place.”
The Asian Champions Trophy, one of the region’s foremost men’s hockey competitions, is set to run from October 27 to November 5, bringing together India, Pakistan, China, Japan, Malaysia and South Korea. Bangladesh and Oman have been named as reserve sides should any of the six withdraw.
Group matches will take place in Jalandhar, with the semi-finals and final staged in Mohali. The tournament’s most keenly anticipated fixture — a meeting between India and Pakistan on November 1 — is scheduled for Jalandhar and will fall on Punjab Day. Mann described the clash as one of the tournament’s principal draws, telling PTI: “India and Pakistan may have their rivalries on the hockey field, but sport has its own language.”
Bhola Nath Singh, secretary general of Hockey India, who appeared alongside Mann at Monday’s event, characterised relations between the two countries’ hockey federations as “excellent.”
Sporting contact between India and Pakistan has long been hostage to the broader political relationship. India’s sports policy prohibits bilateral engagements with its neighbour, though the Sports Ministry has previously indicated the two nations may face each other within multilateral tournaments, consistent with the Olympic Charter. Pakistan withdrew from last year’s Junior World Cup in Tamil Nadu, citing heightened bilateral tensions.
Cricketing ties between the two countries have in recent years been managed through a so-called hybrid model, under which Pakistan’s matches are relocated to neutral venues. No equivalent arrangement has been suggested for hockey, and PHF officials reiterated on Monday that the team’s participation remains unresolved, dependent solely on formal government approval before any squad could be sent.
India go into the tournament as defending champions, having won the last two stagings — the 2023 edition in Chennai, in which Pakistan also competed, and the 2024 tournament in Hulunbuir, China. The competition was not held last year. This year’s edition opens in Jalandhar on October 27, with the final in Mohali on November 5.
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