Times of India: Hockey World League Final 2017: Maintaining consistency remains a big challenge for India
Feroz Khan
BHUBANESWAR: You didn’t have to watch the India-England Hockey World League Final league stage encounter to know who had won. A glance at the expression of Indian skipper Manpreet Singh gave away the result as he sat beside coach Sjoerd Marijne while addressing the media after India suffered a 2-3 defeat on Saturday night.
Barely looking at anyone with his eyes fixated downwards, the young captain was in a pensive mood with coach doing the most of the talking. When finally, a question was addressed to him, the usual cheerfulness in his voice was missing but his replies were sharp.
“We cannot play the entire game at one pace,” Manpreet said when asked why India and especially he raised the game only in the final 10 minutes when they were trailing 0-2. “There are times when we need to slow down the pace of the game. Sometimes you attack more, sometimes you have to defend. In the last quarter, we were trailing behind by two goals so we needed to attack more and need to play upfront. So, I played in a more attacking position.”
Marijne felt the intensity wasn’t at the same level as Friday when India played out a 1-1 draw against defending champions Australia. “For me consistency is the big question and why we dropped our level (from yesterday). That’s what we are going to talk about. Because if you have reasons, you can improve on them,” he said.
Indians were guilty of committing several defending errors allowing England easy goals and despite their late push for a win, they ended up conceding a late goal to lose by a narrow margin.
“That’s part of the game but you want to avoid that,” Sjoerd said on the glaring mistakes. “Players aren’t doing it on purpose but it happened and cost us the game. But I don’t think it was only that. The speed of the game in the beginning was not good enough. We kept losing the ball too many times. We not only have to watch individual mistakes but as a team too. The level wasn’t as much like yesterday. We know we have to improve. As I spoke before, we need to work on our consistency. I am happy what happened during the final stages when we equalised. Unfortunately, we lost in the end,” he further added.
India next face Germany in their final league game on Monday and will look to put up the defeat behind and finish on a positive note ahead of the knockouts.