New Delhi: Australian Terry Walsh, who resigned as Indian men's hockey team chief coach today because of a "pay dispute", hinted that he was ready to reconsider his decision if he was given a new contract on his terms and conditions by the Sports Authority of India.
The 60-year-old Australian, a former Olympian, submitted his resignation in dramatic fashion barely three weeks after guiding the team to a historic gold in the Asian Games, saying that he was finding it difficult to adjust to the decision making style of the sporting bureaucracy in the country.
Hours after his resignation was made public, Walsh, whose contract was to run till the 2016 Rio Olympics, said he was looking for a "re-negotiation" for his contract.
"There is obviously fatigue factor but I feel I just need to move away from the contents of what presently exists in my contractual arrangements. We are now looking at the possibility of how that can be reset," Walsh said.
"We are right now in a position of re-negotiations and see how it may or may not turnout. Let's see what happens. We have got a month to solve that," he said.
Walsh said unless there were changes in the way things work in India, it would be difficult to produce results in the 2016 Rio Olympics.
"I believe there needs to be some changes and alterations in the way things operate for us to be able to really give a good shot in 2016. Without those changes I just can't believe that we can go forward," he said.
The Australian conceded that his decision would have come as a shock for everybody.
"All are in a state of shock which was expected. We have become a very close unit. There is a lot more than just the 16 players. There is a whole group. We have got a lot of people invested in what's going on," he said.
Hockey India president Narinder Batra said such a "disaster" was waiting to happen for some time. "I could see this coming quite sometime. There has been
issues, there has been frustrations among the foreign staff.
There is too much of interference, too much of delay from the government side which has been bothering them. We tried to get things sorted out," Batra said.
"There is too much of bureaucracy, too much of paperwork." Hockey India's High Performance Director Roelant Oltmans, however, hoped that things would be sorted out between Walsh and his employer so as to pave the way for the Australian's stay till 2016 Olympics.
"I am sad about it because we have really grouped together well in the past one year. There was real improvement in the performance of the team. I would like Terry to continue but he has his personal reasons to do what he has done and in the end you have to respect that," Oltmans said.
"We started certain processes and that should continue. I am still hopeful that negotiations will lead to Terry's stay till Rio," the legendary Dutchman added.
