BANGKOK: If the Indian women’s hockey team desires to achieve greater laurels in the international circuit, the girls will have to shed their
traditional mistakes, feels national coach MK Kaushik.
Kaushik advocated the need of adopting a uniform coaching strategy at all levels, intensive training and a strong second stream side to get rid of the bugbear.
“If our girls need to harness their true potential, some of the weak areas they carry over by default and over a long period, have to go,” Kaushik said.
“My concern is not just doing well here and there, in one tournament or the other. I envision a sustainable strategy so that our teams play to potential in top level tournaments such as World Cup or Olympics. To reach there players have to be more serious and are willing to unlearn the bad habits,” he said.
Despite India thrashing Singapore 13-0 in their opening match of the ongoing seventh Women’s Asia Cup here, the coach said there is no time to sit back and relax as they take on Thailand on Saturday.
“Our social ethos is that we are easily satisfied and this reflects in the field as well. Our girls are happy with a double digit score against weak teams. Socially speaking, setting high sporting targets once they land in job is not working the way we all would have liked.
“Our training, for instance, is to play attacking defence. It is practiced to near perfection in the camps but on pressure situations, the girls tend to forget what they have learnt,” Kaushik said.
“They start chasing the attackers till things becomes desperate. Almost all players picked up such a habit of ball watching in domestic circuit,” he added.
Asked about the reason behind the drawback, he said, “There is no uniformity in coaching concept. We have limited areas which produces players. After the centralised camps, girls go back and follow another pattern there.
Kaushik believes grooming of second string team is indispensable.
“We don’t have a strong second stream team now, this infuses casualness among the settled players,” he said.