THE victorious coach AK Bansal wants at least two or three exposure tours to European countries before the Men’s Junior World Cup Hockey Tournament that will be held jointly by Singapore and Malaysia next year.

Speaking to The New Indian Express a day after his boys conquered South Korea 3-2 in the final of the Asia Cup, Bansal said the matches against tough teams will help them improve their game.

“We need good matches to know our real strength.

We had only two tough matches — against Pakistan and South Korea in this tournament. Before playing big teams like Australia, Germany , Holland or Spain, we need to play some competitive matches, say in European countries,” he said.

Bansal refuted that his team had overaged players as alleged by the Malaysia and Singapore teams. “We can prove with all the documents. The same set of players, like Sunil, Gurbaz played in the Azlan Shah in Malaysia. We can’t change players passports overnight,” said Bansal, adding, “all the players except for Roshan (Minz) are eligible to play in next year’s World Cup.” The coach said fitness played a big role in India’s triumph. “We focused on fitness and speed. In the past our game use to slacken in the second-half. In Friday’s final the boys played the best game in the last 15 minutes of the match. That surprised the Koreans. I was confident that if we develop speed we can beat any team with our skills,” he said. Bansal was second time lucky after losing to Argentina in the Azlan Shah final. “This was a tougher test than the Azlan Shah tournament.

There was nothing much to lose in that tournament as we had a young team. But it was a different story here.

We needed to win this tournament to keep the game of hockey alive and kicking.
I’m happy the boys played tremendously to defend the title successfully. We should now focus on the future with these boys,” he said.

The coach said since India have three fine dragflickers in Sandeep Singh, Diwakar Ram and V Raghunath, it can be a big advantage to the team. “We have match-winners in these drag-flickers. This is a huge bonus to us. In any international tournament the matches are decided by penalty corners and we have to use it to our advantage. The forwards have to create the penalty corners which we saw against Korea and Diwakar did the rest,” said Bansal.