How Two Hockey World Cups Are Being Played in Silence

There is a peculiar cruelty in the fact that India, a country that still, officially and sentimentally, calls hockey its national game, can run live World Cup campaigns for over a week without most of its own citizens knowing they started. And to be precise about what's actually happening: this isn't one tournament; it's two, running concurrently at the same venues in Belgium and the Netherlands. The men's team has played two matches, a win over Wales, and a heartbreak-tinged 4-2 loss to England that extended a 32-year wait for a World Cup victory over that opponent. The women's team, meanwhile, has been quietly brilliant: an unbeaten start, a 2-2 draw against Olympic silver medalists China, followed by a dominant 6-1 demolition of South Africa that took them to the top of their pool with qualification for the next round within reach. Four results. Real drama, real history, real stakes. Almost none of it has made a dent in the national conversation.

This isn't a coincidence. It's a pattern, and it's worth examining honestly, starting with an inconvenient fact that undercuts the easiest excuse for it.

There Isn't Even a Hosting Excuse Here

It would be one thing if India's indifference to distant sport were the issue, if this were merely "a tournament happening somewhere else, therefore lower salience." But that framing doesn't hold, because Indian media covers plenty happening far from Indian soil when it's cricket: an Ashes series in Australia gets wall-to-wall previews, ball-by-ball text commentary, and prime-time panel debates, despite involving zero Indian interest whatsoever. Distance is not the disqualifier; it's being treated as if it were here. The absence of coverage for a tournament India is actively playing in, competitively, in both the men's and women's brackets, cannot be explained by geography. It has to be explained by priority.

The Cricket Excuse Is Real, But It's Not the Whole Story

The India–Sri Lanka Test series is indeed unfolding at almost the same time, and cricket's gravitational pull on Indian sports media is not new. But "cricket is popular" has become a lazy alibi that lets broadcasters, newspapers, and digital platforms off the hook for a much more deliberate set of choices: which sports get pre-match previews, which get panel discussions, which get push notifications, and which get a single wire-copy paragraph buried three scrolls down a sports homepage.

Cricket's dominance isn't purely organic. It's manufactured and reinforced daily by an ecosystem - advertisers, television rights holders, sponsors - that has every financial incentive to keep hockey exactly where it is: present, nominally, but never urgent.

Two Stories Being Told Nowhere

The frustrating part is that neither tournament is short on material and the women's campaign, if anything, has the stronger sporting narrative right now. Holding a higher-ranked, Olympic-medal-winning Chinese side to a draw, then following it with a six-goal rout of South Africa, is the kind of form that would generate days of cricket-style coverage - form-guide graphics, "player of the match" reels, build-up pieces to the next fixture - if it belonged to any bat-and-ball team. Instead, it has barely registered as a footnote.

The men's defeat to England wasn't routine either; it was historically loaded. The team led twice, lost the plot in the second half, and walked away still without a World Cup win over England since 1994. That is precisely the kind of storyline, legacy, heartbreak, a three-decade curse that dominates cricket coverage when it happens toViratKohli or Rohit Sharma. When it happens to Harmanpreet Singh, it barely registers.

Structurally, too, this is a significant edition: the first-ever co-hosted men's World Cup, split across Belgium and the Netherlands, featuring sixteen nations across five confederations in each of the men's and women's events - 72 matches in total. There is a legitimate global spectacle here, doubled. Indian coverage has largely reduced both tournaments to schedule-and-streaming-link service journalism - useful, but inert. It tells you where to watch, never why you should care, and rarely even acknowledges that there are two Indian teams worth following, not one.

The Deeper Problem: Selective National Memory

India loves hockey retroactively. It resurrects the sport in moments of nostalgia - Olympic bronze medals, biopics, anniversaries of 1975 and then lets it recede the moment the moment passes. This is a convenient kind of patriotism: cheap to perform, costly to sustain. A living World Cup campaign, happening in real time, demands sustained attention. Nostalgia doesn't.

The players bear the cost of this asymmetry most directly. They train, travel, and compete at the highest level of their sport, knowing that unless they win a medal or produce a viral moment, the coverage will be thin, the public indifferent, and the endorsement economy nonexistent. Contrast that with a bilateral T20 series that will be forgotten in a month but is treated, while it lasts, as a matter of national importance.

What Would Actually Change This

The fix isn't complicated, even if the incentives make it unlikely:

●      Editorial will, not audience demand, drives most sports coverage decisions in India. Newsrooms could choose to feature hockey prominently and let audience interest follow, rather than waiting for demand that television economics have never allowed to form.

●      Broadcasters and streaming platforms could integrate hockey into prime-time sports bulletins instead of relegating it to a standalone, opt-in stream that only committed fans seek out.

●    Sponsors and federations could invest in storytelling, player profiles, rivalry build-ups, the same machinery cricket uses relentlessly to manufacture stakes even out of dead rubbers.

None of this requires the sport to overtake cricket. It requires only that a World Cup, while it is being played by India's own team, be treated as news.

The tournament runs through August 30. India's men's team has matches remaining in the pool stage; there is still time for this story to be told while it's happening - not after.

Please note -

India is FIFA's second-largest national audience on Instagram despite never once qualifying for a World Cup, ahead of the US (the host) and Argentina (the runner-up), driven mostly by fandom for Ronaldo and Messi rather than any national team. Over 35,000 Indian creators actively posted World Cup content, with no Indian player, match, or team to talk about - purely out of borrowed passion, treating the tournament like a cultural moment on par with Diwali or the IPL.

Ironically, India didn't even secure legitimate broadcast rights for the FIFA World Cup 2026 this cycle - no domestic platform's bid met FIFA's price, partly due to brutal midnight-to-dawn kickoff times in IST, and the coverage frenzy happened anyway, off the back of street murals, fan clubs, and influencer content, not television (Zee5 eventually did broadcast it).