International hockey is a serious thing. Nobody allows you any breathing space. It’s very important to be alert all the time and remain battle fit. Otherwise you will be ruthlessly taught a lesson. International sport, more so hockey, can be merciless at times.
My boys playing here in the repeat Hockey Australia Challenge Cup in Sydney understood the harsh reality on Wednesday. Though everything looked right till the half time, the tide changed for worse in the second half. Malaysia defeated us 0-3 in the Challenge Opener. They scored all their goals in the latter part of second half.
Many back home might think we have taken the Malaysians lightly just because they did not qualify for the Olympics. With that many changes have occurred in their set up, including removal of Paul Lissek, the German coach training them. But it’s not true. I made it clear in my earlier column in this newspaper that we are as serious as we would be against any other strong teams.
Malaysians are here to prove their hockey is alive despite their poor finish at the recent Madrid Olympic Qualifier. They are not here to learn, experiment and firm up a team for the Athens Olympics, which incidentally are the objectives of other three teams in the tournament. That’s how they put up a good game today. I only wish them good luck. I may be the coach of a losing team, but won’t deny them their due credit for the victory. ,
Having said that I must also inform our hockey fans that not everything is lost here. It’s only our first match. What we look at this moment is next match, not the one we lost. This is exactly what I told the boys: ‘Forget this match as a bad dream. Relax and get ready for another day, another match’. Hope they got the message.
Against Malaysia, we had run into serious injury problems. I had to rest defender Kanwalpreet Singh, left winger Prabhjot Singh and midfielder Viren Rasquinha. All these three players carried the injury they suffered in Canberra, and now have got aggravated. They are ruled out for the next matches too.
If you look at the injured list closely, you will come to know that a good player in each three departments of the game — defence, midfield and forwardline — missed the match against Malaysia. It’s a rare situation, unforeseen and my bench here cannot cope up with this type of contingencies.
Still I feel we conceded more space and ball to our rivals. Our defence and midfield should have played with more patience which they showed in abundance in the first half. I feel just out of panic we conceded too many penalty corners too.
Normally Kuhan Shanmuganathan used to take penalty corners. When Malaysian coach Yahoo Atan preferred Mohammad Amin Rahim today, our defence fail to anticipate the change. It was Amin Rahim who scored the last two goals, which I consider could have easily been avoided.
We have a long way to go, and keep the spirit high for our match against the hosts on Thursday.