Indian coach: Players lack Individual brilliance

Indian Sub-Junior team’s coach BJ Kariappa, who is also High Performance Manager (South) for Hockey India, rues lack of Individual brilliance with his players that led to first ever defeat of India to Bangladesh here in Dhaka.

Despite coming back into the game thrice, India lost to the hosts 5-4 today in the opening match.

“We are training for the tournament less than a month. Its quite inadequate. However, the boys showed some good hockey, but they did not have quality individual brilliance to force a victory in such a tight situation”, visibly upset coach Cariappa rued.

“Our boys


are playing their first tournament. A huge turn out today in their first match must have over-awed them as well, pointed out to the fact of a few thousand crowd.

“Due to our domestic season in full swing and the tournaments taking place outside our camp city, we could not get strong teams for practice too, he added.

He also complimented the team for striking four times, but felt the team could have done better if the players understand the game tactically, and it will come in due course” he added.

He is hastened to add that there are many areas to concentrate now like conceding penalty corners, poor penalty corner defence, yielding goal by goalkeeper on bodyline moves. These are grey areas he needs to work on before India going for the next match.

Having lost the first encounter, India is now in a precarious situation to post a win in the next match tomorrow against Oman, lest it will be pushed out of knock out stage.

But the coach is not unduly worried about those things now, as “China may defeat Pakistan and this scenario who we will meet in the semis is a big quesiton mark. Any case, there is a long way to go”, the coach said.

India did show it has in it to make a match of today, as it scored four times, but it had no answer to Md. Ashraful Islam, who scored four penalty corner goals.

“We were in a hurry to clear the PC situations, and in the process, we lost out. Our should have shown more reflex in clearing but we were not up to the mark. Its here individual brilliance of players come to effect. They are young, and will learn from these mistakes”, he said.

Bangladesh was resorting to frequent overhead passes, our boys could not match them on this count,” the coach said.

He also pointed out the fact that he did not have desired level of bench strength.

“Even if I want to substitute, the bench strength is so poor I will not have choices”, he added.

It seems other teams have trained for a longer period and came well prepared. However, its first match, we need to play Oman tomorrow, a win will put us in the semis”.

However, he is unsure how good or bad of Oman.

“We haven’t seen them playing. We don’t have any clue about their capabilities. They played in Pakistan and lost the series. However, I feel the situation is same for them too, they also would not have seen us playing. Such things happen in the start up age group tournaments. My boys will be ready to face the situation.

Captain Neelam Xess conceded its penalty corner conversion that has led them down.

“Yes I was taking but thing did not work out our way”, he said in a soft voice.