Sports Authority of India keen to resolve Terry Walsh matter, wants him to stay

NEW DELHI: After a high-drama exit of Indian men's hockey team chief coach Terry Walsh, who resigned following a "pay dispute" with the Sports Authority of India, the SAI DG Jiji Thomson has assured that the matter will be "resolved" as they want the veteran Australian to continue.

SAI DG said he had met Walsh at his office on Tuesday and tried to convince the Australian to carry on in his post.

"I met him (Walsh) when he came to SAI. He told me that he doesn't have any issues with SAI. The matter will be resolved. We want him to continue in his position," Thomson told PTI.

Even Walsh had hinted that he was ready to reconsider his decision if he was given a new contract on his terms and conditions by the SAI.

"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 added.

Walsh resigned from his post barely three weeks after guiding the team to a historic gold medal in the Asian Games in Incheon and it created quite a flutter in the hockey world.

The 60-year-old Australian, himself a noted Olympian, submitted his resignation in dramatic fashion, saying that he was finding it difficult to adjust to the decision making style of the sporting bureaucracy in the country. His contract was to run till the 2016 Rio Olympics.

Soon after his resignation, Sports Minister Sarbananda Sonowal said that he was looking for a resolution of the issue and has sought a report from SAI within the next 24 hours.

Walsh's resignation created a flutter in the hockey fraternity and triggered off a blame game between Hockey India and SAI.

While HI maintained that the pay dispute and suffocating bureaucracy had prompted Walsh to quit, SAI rubbished that claim, saying that the Australian had never complained of any financial issues.