IndiaPost.com - Charlesworth, Carvalho's fate undecided

NEW DELHI: The uncertainty over the future of Technical Advisor Ric Charlesworth and chief coach Joaquim Carvalho continued to persist as the Indian Hockey Federation held a brainstorming meetings for the third successive day.

After a series of meetings with Charlesworth, Carvalho and former Olympians over the past two days, it was the turn of the office bearers and executive committee members to convey their suggestions to IHF chief KPS Gill following India's failure to qualify for the Olympics.

Though the IHF continued to remain tight-lipped, a source who attended the meeting, told PTI "suggestions were sought from various members about how to get out of this stage."

The source added that "nothing had been finalized yet" on the future of roles of Charlesworth and Carvalho as discussions were still on. "Gill wants to seek views of every member.

He even wants to know what the media thinks about the whole issue," he said. It is learnt that even Gill did not want to tell the office bearers anything about Charlesworth as the Sports Ministry and he are still having talks with the Australian.

The source said that a strong lobby was there for the removal of Carvalho from the chief coach's post, but the IHF chief did not appear very keen for that keeping in mind India's forthcoming assignment in Australia next month. "Maybe his future would come up for discussion after that tournament," he added.

A member also raised the question as to why certain players were not included in the team for the Olympic qualifiers in Chile. The discussion will continue tomorrow and there is a chance that the participants of the meetings held in the last two days maybe invited once again for another round of talks next week.

The day once again began with uncertainty with Gill meeting Senior Vice President Chander Sekhar, Vice Presidents Dinesh Vajpayee and Umesh Kumar, Secretary K Jothikumaran, Joint Secretaries K Krishnamoorthy, Rajiv Mehta, SP Dass, V Ramchander Rao, Pratap Satpathy, Gurdeep Singh, N Ramesh Kolappa, Niranjan Reddy, Charanjit Singh, Treasurer J N Tyagi, V S Kandari of Services Sports Promotion Board and Rakesh Yadav of Railways Sports Promotion Board. Later, Charlesworth, Project Director of 'Promoting Indian Hockey' Bob Davidzon and Indian Women's Hockey Federation Secretary Amrit Bose also met Gill.

After several hours of deliberation, Bose told the assembled mediapersons "we are moving forward," while Charlesworth and Davidzon did not take questions.