Australian goalkeeper Diletti on India’s radar

BANGALORE: Veteran Australian goalkeeper Damon Diletti may be roped as a goalkeeping consultant, albeit for a short period, to boost the standard of goalkeeping in the national team.

“The goalkeeping situation causes concern. The four goalkeepers I’ve seen at the trials aren’t as good as the Australians. We have to spend more time training them to bring them up to the standard we need them to be at,” chief coach Michael Nobbs said.

Triple Olympian Diletti, who trained under Nobbs as a junior, may not be immediately requested to help the team but will be the first person to be called upon to fix the problem once the domestic options are exhausted.

“The first one I’ll probably ring is Damon Diletti. I’ve coached him for many years. He’s a good personal friend of mine and has been an outstanding goalkeeper for Australia. We may need to do that if we can’t solve the problem. But at this stage, let’s work with what we’ve got. There’s enough hockey knowledge in this country,” Nobbs said.

According to the Australian, all the goalkeepers at the camp fared poorly in penalty corner defence. “All of them let quite a number of goals in during the trials. None of them stood out. If you look at the goalkeepers for Australia, they stand out, they’re world class. That’s what we’re looking for in India.”

Nobbs felt the team wouldn’t really understand the strengths and weaknesses of the goalkeepers until they played a few games. “I am not sure whether they employ wrong techniques. We have to play enough practice matches and see whether there is a fundamental fault in their game. But we won’t really know until we play some games.”

Will the accent turn towards juniors then?

“We’re going to develop juniors anyway,” Nobbs said. “We’ve got talent in this country that we haven’t seen yet. But that is in the long term. As of now, we have to focus on the keepers we’ve got at the moment: it’s just that we have to spend more time than I thought originally, working on their technique.”

Nobbs, however, ruled out a foreign expert for penalty corners. “We have Jugraj who was an outstanding dragflicker himself. He’s really good. You also have Sandeep Singh – one of the best flickers in the world. These are world class brains, world class athletes,” he said.

Hockey tournaments postponed: The twin four-nation hockey tournaments for the Punjab Gold Cup, to be held at Amritsar and Jalandhar from September 22, have been postponed to next year. In all probability, the events may be held in March.

Two of the teams which had confirmed participation — New Zealand and Argentina — cried off, forcing the organisers to reschedule the event. Pakistan was the other foreign team in the fray.

“Now, we get some more time for development work ahead of the qualifiers,” Nobbs said.