Oz rules football ‘dictates’ Indian hockey

TNN Sep 27, 2011:
BANGALORE: The Indian hockey team’s training session will be linked to the Australian Rules football final between Collingwood and Geelong this Saturday. There is no earthly reason why these two games have to be associated with one another but for the hockey team’s exercise physiologist David John, the final at the Melbourne Cricket Ground is crucial to the Indians’ fitness workout the following day.

Confused? Well, this happens to be John’s plan: “Each team in the footy final has 22 players. So that makes it 44 players. We allocate one of our squad members to each ARF player,” says John. “Whenever the footballer gets possession, the corresponding Indian hockey player will be asked to do a 30m sprint the next day. This is to inject Australian flavour to the game.”

Explaining the logic, John says: “A possession or kick is equivalent to doing a 30m sprint. That’s the distance they generally run in ARF to get a possession.”

John has assigned a sprint each to possession, mark and handpass and six sprints for each goal scored in the final. “At the end of the game the statistics for each player would be compiled and translated to the number of sprints his hockey counterpart in Bangalore would end up doing,” he said.

John wondered whether the final would be telecast live in India but said it didn’t really matter as he would download all details from the internet.

Interestingly, the hockey players haven’t been told yet about the new exercise. “I will tell them on Friday night as the ARF teams would be finalised by that afternoon. We can also allocate players at the end of the match.”

The hockey team members cannot pray for an allocation to the reserve players in the ARF teams as even that game is governed by the rolling substitution rule. “There are as many as 120 rotations during a game and all get to play. In any case, our hockey players wouldn’t know who the good footy players are.” John has tweaked what actually is a beer-guzzling contest during these games Down Under.