When the Indian women’s hockey team made their historic run to a fourth-place finish at the recently-concluded Tokyo Olympics, the team’s head coach Sjoerd Marijne became a fan favourite. Marijne, who took over the team in 2017, has been credited by fans and experts to transform the unit from minnows to potential world beaters. At Tokyo, he revitalised the Indian campaign after the team lost their first three games and looked all set to crash out early. The coach chalks the turnaround to the team’s belief in their abilities. “I worked day and night with the girls. But the fans go by the results. They see the results against Netherlands and Germany and wonder, ‘Will these girls make it?’ But we always had self-belief and that is the most important thing,” he says.

Having completed his tenure with the team, the Dutchman has now returned home to spend more time with his family. He admits it was tough to adapt to the country and its culture. “It has been tough. I will be honest about it. The culture here is very different from my country. It took me a long time to get the girls to play how I wanted them to play,” he says.

When he took over the team, they were ranked outside the top 10 in the world and had crashed out of the Olympics without winning a game. Though the results did not change overnight, Marijne credits the improvement to the girls’ resilience. He says, “We had a lot of setbacks in tournaments where we didn’t do well. But every time, you move on. One of the things that always kept me here was that the girls always kept pushing themselves. They never said no and were always eager to learn.”

After the team’s quarter-final victory over favourites Australia, Marijne’s social media banter with reel coach Shah Rukh Khan went viral. Laughing about the incident, Marijne says, “Social media clout was never my goal. It just happened. I think the best things in life just happen to you and this is one of them. I posted a tweet that it would be a while before I could return home. And it went viral and Shah Rukh Khan responded. Of course, it all had to do with the movie Chak De! India. The conversation between us was very natural and funny, from both sides. It was unplanned. I am happy everyone loved it.”

After his tweet suggesting it may be time for Chak De 2, the coach says he is being asked if he has anyone in mind to portray him on screen. “Oh, I don’t know if there are many blonde Indian actors for that. Maybe someone from my part of the world,” he says with a shrug.

Funnily enough, it wasn’t the first time Marijne had a Chak De moment on social media. In 2019, he had reposted a Hockey India meme with his face photoshopped on SRK’s body on his Instagram. The difference, this time, was that it got a reply from the man himself. As the conversation went viral, it elicited polarising responses online, as is the case every time Chak De! India finds itself mentioned in a conversation around the real hockey team. Some believed that connecting every achievement of the hockey team’s win to a film was demeaning to the team and their triumphs, which deserved to be celebrated on their own. Others, however, argued that Chak De was not just any film but a critically-acclaimed one that had done a lot to make women’s hockey popular among the masses.