Junior World Cup Hockey champion team psychologist from Bengal humiliated

Mrinal Chakraborty not felicitated by State Sports Department

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Sports psychologist Mrinal Chakraborty (second from right) flanked by Simranjeet Singh and Gurjant Singh at SAI Kolkata on Monday. Image Source: Xtra Time

Kolkata: Well known sports psychologist Mrinal Chakraborty, who played a key part in helping the junior hockey players emerge as the World Champion recently was left humiliated on Sunday by the State Sports Department. Mrinal has been credited for working on the mental toughness of the junior Indian players. But the sports pschycologist was surprisingly not even invited for the function to felicitate some of the key members of world champion Indian team at the Netaji Indoor Stadium.

Mrinal was appointed by Hockey India as the mental toughness coach in 2014 for its junior national squad. The basic idea behind his appointment was to help the juniors prepare themselves mentally for the recently concluded Junior Hockey World Cup held in Lucknow.

Mrinal, who played hockey for Indian Railways once, has studied on ‘human resource management’ from AR University in Cambridge and then developed his studies on ‘performance management’. His method of NLP (Nero Linguistics Programme) came as a huge help for the junior hockey players.

According to Mrinal, “The programme helped the boys immensely as they showed the mental toughness to come back in a match on numerous occasions. It is a method used by some of the world’s top class sportsmen like Lionel Messi and Usain Bolt.”

Chakraborty specifically created a theme for the junior hockey team which was circulated among all the probable members in the first preparatory camp held in Shilaru two years ago. His theme for the 2016 World Cup hockey read as “We Dream the same Dream, We think the same thing, We are Dream Team, We are Indian team, We are Champion team, We are born to win. Jai Hind.

All the members of the junior world cup hockey team were handed out a baggage tag with the theme which was handed over to them ahead of the competition.

“I found several players had been struggling to build up their mental strength. My focus was to work on their mental toughness.”
The Indian hockey team defeated Belgium 2-1 at home to lift the Junior Hockey World Cup after a gap of 15 years.