On January 2, 2026, Sjoerd Marijne posted a simple message on X. “It’s great to be back. After 4.5 years, I return with fresh energy and a clear vision to support the team’s growth and help the players achieve their full potential on the world stage.”
Indian hockey fans responded with warmth and relief. Marijne is not just a coach to them. He is the man who made them believe. The man who took a team that had spent decades in the wilderness and put them four minutes away from an Olympic medal. His return felt like a correction. Like something that had gone wrong was being put right.
But what exactly is he walking back into? The answer to that question is more complicated than the celebration suggested.
Read More: Complete Schedule of Women’s Hockey World Cup
What Sjoerd Marijne Built the First Time
When Marijne first arrived in 2017, he was largely unknown to Indian hockey fans. A Dutch coach with solid but unremarkable credentials, he came, got moved sideways to the men’s team when Roelant Oltmans was sacked, delivered an Asia Cup gold, then got replaced after a disappointing fourth place at the 2018 Commonwealth Games. Harendra Singh came in for the men. Marijne went back to the women.
What happened next is the story Indian hockey tells itself most often. The steady results. The silver at the 2018 Asian Champions Trophy. The silver at the Jakarta Asian Games. The tense two-legged Olympic qualifier against the United States in 2019, won 6-5 on aggregate. Then Covid, the bio-bubble, and Marijne turning back from the airport rather than risk not being able to return to his team.
The Tokyo Olympics
Tokyo, when it finally arrived in 2021, started badly. India lost their first three group games against Netherlands, Germany, and Great Britain. Then they won their next two. Then they did what no one expected. They beat Australia 1-0 in the quarterfinals. Approximately 300 million Indians watched that match. India lost to Argentina in the semi-final and then lost the bronze medal match to Great Britain 4-3. Fourth place. The best finish in the history of Indian women’s hockey at the Olympics.
“An Indian journalist said to me: you may not have won a medal, but you did inspire the country.” — Sjoerd Marijne
But Tokyo was not built on one quarterfinal win. It was built on an environment. Marijne, Janneke Schopman as his analytical coach, Wayne Lombard as the scientific advisor who transformed the team’s fitness levels, a specific culture of belief and physical conditioning that took years to assemble. The Australia result was the proof of what that environment could produce on its best day. The environment itself was the real achievement.
What Four Years Without Him Actually Looked Like
The hope after Tokyo was real. India had reached a semifinal. The expectation was that this was the floor, not the ceiling. That Indian women’s hockey would build from here toward a genuine top five or six position in the world.
Schopman: The Numbers Tell a Different Story
Schopman was the natural successor. She had been at Marijne’s side through the entire Tokyo campaign. She knew the system, knew the players, understood the philosophy. And her record, when you look at it honestly, was not the record of a failed coach. In 74 matches as head coach, India won 38, lost 19, and drew 17. She won the FIH Nations Cup in Valencia in 2022, the Asian Champions Trophy in Ranchi in 2023, and delivered bronze medals at the Commonwealth Games and the Asian Games. She kept the team competitive.
But two things worked against her. First, Wayne Lombard, the scientific advisor who had built the fitness platform under Marijne, left after Tokyo. The support structure that underpinned everything Marijne had built did not fully transfer. Second, Schopman herself was frank about the environment she operated in. “India is extremely difficult as a woman,” she told the Indian Express before she resigned. The resistance she encountered was real and she named it directly.
Her record deserved better than the narrative that followed her resignation. But the two results that mattered most, ninth place at the 2022 World Cup and fourth place at the Paris Olympic qualifier in Ranchi in 2024, ended her tenure. She resigned in February 2024, a month after India failed to qualify for Paris.
Harendra and the Real Collapse
Then came Harendra Singh. A respected Indian coach, a Junior World Cup winner, a different philosophy entirely. In the FIH Pro League 2024-25, India won two of sixteen matches. They finished last. They were relegated from the Pro League to the Nations Cup. It was the lowest point Indian women’s hockey had reached since the Marijne era. Harendra resigned in December 2025, citing personal reasons.
The four years after Tokyo were not a straight line downward. Schopman kept the team functional and competitive. The real collapse came later, and quickly. By the time Marijne returned in January 2026, the distance between where the team was and where it had been in 2021 was significant.
What Sjoerd Marijne Has Come Back To
India are currently ranked ninth in the world. Three places below where they were at the peak of Marijne’s first stint. Fitness, which Marijne had made the cornerstone of the Tokyo campaign, had visibly slipped under subsequent setups. One significant development in Marijne’s return is that Wayne Lombard, the scientific advisor who built the physical platform during the Tokyo campaign and left after 2021, has also come back. The environment that produced Tokyo is not being rebuilt from scratch. At least one of its key architects is back alongside Marijne.
Three Systems, Four Years, One Confused Squad
But the fitness deficit is only part of what he has inherited. The deeper problem is tactical. In four years, this squad has been through three fundamentally different coaching philosophies. Under Schopman, the emphasis was on simplifying decision making and moving the ball quickly. Under Harendra, the team shifted toward a high pressing style with intense fitness demands. Now Marijne is asking for something different again. Fast, direct, vertical hockey built on interdependence. Players do not just learn tactics intellectually. They internalize movement patterns, positioning instincts, decision-making triggers. Three systems in four years means those instincts have been overwritten repeatedly. The players know what to do in theory. Under pressure, when instinct takes over, that confusion shows.
The Pro League relegation makes this harder in a way that goes beyond status. Without Pro League fixtures, India will not test their systems against the Netherlands, Argentina, or Germany before the World Cup. Those matches are not just competitive opportunities. They are diagnostic tools. They tell a coach what is working under genuine high-level pressure and what is not. Marijne is arriving at the World Cup in August having had the Nations Cup in June as his only serious benchmark against top international opposition. That is a significant preparation gap that the relegation created and that no amount of domestic training can fully replace.
A Generation That Never Saw Tokyo
There is also a generational gap. The players who were part of Tokyo are older now. Some have retired. The new generation coming through did not experience that quarterfinal win against Australia. They do not carry that reference point of what this team can do on its absolute best day. Building belief in players who have not experienced what belief can produce is a different challenge from rebuilding it in players who have.
The World Cup qualifier in Hyderabad offered early signs of what Marijne is working with. India finished second, scoring eleven goals, six from penalty corners. They lost the final to England 2-0. There is talent in this squad. The gap is not about individual quality. It is about the environment that turns individual quality into collective performance, and four years of tactical inconsistency have made that environment harder to rebuild.
The Question His Return Actually Raises
Marijne is not just coming back to coach a hockey team. He is trying to recreate an environment that took years to build, with a squad that has been through three different coaching philosophies in four years, in a fraction of the time he had before.
The compressed timeline is unforgiving. The World Cup in Belgium and the Netherlands runs from August 15 to 29. The Asian Games in Japan follow in September. Win the Asian Games gold and India go directly to LA 2028. The cycle demands results before the environment has had time to fully settle.
There is a personal dimension to the World Cup assignment. Marijne is Dutch. He will coach India at Wagener Stadium in Amstelveen, a venue he knows intimately. “I know how good they can organise these things. And I know how amazing an event it will be. And that’s why personally for me, I really like to go there,” he has said. Coaching India in the Netherlands, against the country that produced him, adds a layer to this assignment that goes beyond tactics and results.
He has also been open about why he came back when he did not expect to. “One minute I thought: I have it very good now. The next minute I thought: why should I let this opportunity run?” His family, his wife Brigitte and his children, pushed him to say yes. And when asked privately why, he said: “I never thought I would come back. But I followed everything because India is in my heart.”
Whether It Can Work
The honest version of this story is that Marijne is walking back into something harder than what he left. Marijne is not inheriting the team he built. He is inheriting a team that has been through Schopman, who was undermined by factors beyond her control, and Harendra, whose tenure produced a collapse. He is inheriting a fitness deficit, a confidence gap, and a generation of players who need to be shown rather than told what this team can become.
The Argentina tour in early 2026 offered something. A 2-2 series draw against the world’s second-ranked team. Marijne pointed to mental strength and fitness improvements as genuine positives. He flagged circle entries and finishing as the areas that still need work. That is a coach who knows exactly what he is building and what still needs to be built.
Whether the environment he is creating can produce results before August is the question that the next few months will answer. Tokyo took four years to build. Marijne has months.
Read our Two part series on Hockey India off the field of play.
Part 1: The Federation Is Not the Dressing Room: Why Hockey India Needs Professional Administration
Part 2: The Federation Is Not the Dressing Room, Part 2: What Hockey India Own Documents Reveal
From One Home to Another
But here is what makes August different from any other assignment he has had. In 2021, Marijne left India as the coach who inspired a nation, and could not go home because Covid had closed the borders. He turned back from the airport to stay with his team in a bio-bubble. He chose India when he could have chosen home.
In 2026, he is taking India to Amstelveen. To Wagener Stadium. To the literal heart of Dutch hockey, the country that produced him, the sport he grew up watching and loving. He is not coaching India in a neutral venue. He is coaching his second home in his first home.
Tokyo was built in a bubble, cut off from the world, under conditions nobody would choose. Amstelveen is the opposite. It is open, familiar, his. If he can take this team there and produce something, it will not be a result born of isolation and circumstance. It will be proof that what he built in 2021 was never about the bubble. It was always about the blueprint.
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