THE HOOKED INTERVIEW hugh robertson –


As minister for sport And the olympics, hugh roBertson mp is A Busy mAn. But, fortunAtely for us, he is A hockey enthusiAst And when he popped down to A gB hockey trAining session At Aldershot he spAred some time to tAlk to push ABout hockey, the olympics And Beyond.


So tell us a bit about your involvement in hockey. My enthusiasm for hockey comes from my father really. He played for many years at Canterbury and is still involved in the club now, in terms of spectating, he watches a lot of hockey at the age of 81. That was the initial spur. Then I played at school, at university and then when I was in the Army. When I left the Army and went to work in the City, I stopped for a whole number of reasons


– I was doing other things at the weekends. And then when I moved back to Kent , where I was born and brought up, I started playing again for the local


Alex Broadway


side Sutton Valence Veterans. I haven’t played this year for fairly obvious reasons but I played for the Parliamentary side just before the election, against Wapping Hockey Club. We have three or four fixtures a year.


You are being quite modest. You did play hockey for the Army didn’t you? I did, but not regularly. I joined the Army to play sport but then ended up in a regiment that gave me very little time for sport because we were often away on operations – Northern Ireland, Cyprus, the Gulf War, Sarajevo. The opportunities for sport were rather more limited than I had anticipated when I joined. But I did play a lot of hockey when we were stationed in Germany. In those day’s on parade squares, on tarmac surfaces, or grass. It was pre-astroturf or the Army did not have the money to build astroturf surfaces. So it was quite a shock to come back to hockey after a break – the skill level in the game has gone up amazingly.


We saw you have a long talk with the GB team management and the players. What sort of things were you discussing? Firstly I was trying to find out where they are in terms of London 2012


– how confident they are, what their chances are of medalling. Also I want to understand better the sort of support


the squad have around them, then to try and get a better understanding of what they are trying to achieve in a training session. Obviously this is one day they have and then they all disappear at 5 o’clock in the evening. There are many other sports where they have the squads permanently, day-in day-out. So I was trying to understand why they run the system as they do, what the benefits are and what they get out of it.


Did you learn much? An enormous amount. One of the dangers of my job is that there is so much to do in the Ministry in London and in Parliament that you can spend an awful lot of time doing that and it’s all to easy not to get out and to talk to people and listen to people. People are always saying MPs have lost touch with the real world and they should get out-and-about and talk to people. But the advantage of this week has been that I was up at Harlow opening the new Leisurezone, talking to people about community sport, I was at Bisham Abbey this morning and had a chance to talk to the women’s rowing squad and the canoeing squad, and I’m here with the hockey squad this afternoon. The value of that is you get to talk to people, find out what’s worrying them, what’s going well and get a feel for what is happening.


So where is hockey in relation to London 2012? In a very good place at the moment. Clearly everybody who cares about hockey absolutely understands that the ultimate prize is to win an Olympic gold, preferably at London 2012. That is going to be extremely difficult – I know that – but the lift that medalling would give to the sport would be enormous. Hockey will be showcased fantastically in the Olympic Park. My guess is that there will be quite a number of people who think ‘well I won’t be able to get tickets for the athletics or the velodrome’ but actually, if you follow team sports – if you are a rugby fan football fan, a team sport watcher


Left to right: Bobby Crutchley and Andy Halliday from the GB/England coaching staff talk hockey with sports and Olympics minister Hugh Robertson and GB/England captain Barry Middleton


– and you want to get something of the Olympic experience, then watching a hockey game will be a very good way of doing it. So I guess there will be quite a number of people who, because it’s London 2012, will come to hockey for the first time. There is a huge opportunity.


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