Hockey World Cup 2023: Xess' rise a reflection of sport's development in Rourkela

The final batches of nuts and bolts are being hammered into the Steel City to get it ready for its biggest carnival yet.

ROURKELA: Just as one of the team buses left the Games Village for the Birsa Manda Hockey Stadium in the city (it's a very short drive, roughly 200 metres), a player couldn't help himself. So, he took out his phone and captured a few images of the stadium from the bus for posterity. After tilting it horizontally, he tilted the phone vertically for more shots and, presumably, videos.

It's something a lot of people have been doing ever since the hockey arena — one of the biggest in the world — was inaugurated earlier this month. It's everything the Odisha government promised when they first unveiled the plans to construct a complex in the last days of 2020. On the afternoon of December 24, 2020, chief minister Naveen Patnaik, said as much.

“As a tribute to the contribution of Sundargarh to Indian hockey, I would like to announce that we will build a new international level hockey stadium in Rourkela with a seating capacity of 20,000," he had said. "The new stadium is going to redefine the sports landscape in the region," he vowed. It's been doing a lot of wow-ing.

Its vibe is hard to miss. Even as you take a glimpse of it from the outside, you get the feel of approaching a football venue. The imposing nature of the multi-tiered stands on all four sides is capable of creating an atmosphere even on non match days. 

On Wednesday evening, some 48 hours before the stadium's first match (England vs Wales), a sizable number of locals were patiently waiting at the box office outside the complex to pick up their tickets.

The buzz is genuine. You can see it on the motifs across the city — bronze statues of hockey players on both sides of newly-laid roads, murals on the walls of buildings, pavements, walls and billboards... this city is breathing the sport two days out from the start of the biggest party it has hosted.

It will be that bit more special for the spectators because they will be cheering on one of their own, Nilam Sanjeep Xess, a son of the Rourkela soil. He's the latest in a long line of players to have emerged from this hockey-living belt. He was brought up in a village that's roughly a 90-minute drive (Ghoghar to be exact, a stone's throw away from Jharkhand).

The dusty ground where Xess used to play in his village

At some level, Xess' sudden meteoric rise, both in his personal and professional life, mirrors the developmental works parts of Rourkela has been subject to over the last 20-24 months or so. In 2017, Xess' house didn't have electricity. He didn't have access to playing on an astroturf so he had to learn hockey on a brown, sandy uneven piece of land.

That piece of land still exists today (that a tyre forms part of the centre circle tells you everything you need to know), with scores of kids still playing the sport there. In the professional front, his career had seemingly stagnated after making his debut in 2016. The defender didn't figure among the 18 that made the trip to Tokyo. But after being recalled to the side in the back-end of 2021, he gradually worked his way into the core group. At 34 caps, he's one of the most inexperienced members of the group but that won't faze him one bit.

Nothing captures the development quite like the presence of a newly-minted, sparkling blue astroturf arena on the way to Xess' house (from Rourkela). The facility creeps up unannounced, next to questionable roads — some of them are clearly in various stages of development -- and barren lands on both sides. The infrastructure is a part of the wider hockey-related projects that the government undertook (each block in the state was promised at least one turf). 

Speaking of the infrastructure, a lot of it has been completed in Rourkela. Earthmovers — very much visible in most street corners in December 2021 — have moved out. Roads have widened, gardens have come up at various locations around the city and some Insta spots (I <3 Rourkela in stencil lettering) too have cropped up.

Saying all that, some last minute work is still going on, both inside and outside the stadium. Inside the stadium, cranes are still at work, hurriedly dotting the remaining i's and crossing the final t's. The final batches of nuts and bolts are being hammered into the Steel City to get it ready for its biggest carnival yet.