After a very long time, I am so happy with my performance. I have been
training in perfecting the art of drag flicks for the last several
years. I am grateful to my coach and manager who had confidence in me.
I have to thank the Indian Hockey Federation for allotting me to the
Bangalore Hi-Fliers.

Here I got the necessary support from chief coach Ramesh Parameswaran,
who had consciously worked on my game skills. The improvement I
achieved in the last few months is tremendous and that in turn has
boosted my confiedence. With the change of rule where substitution is
not allowed during the penalty corners, now it is imperative for all
the flickers to perfect the art of tackling and defense play.
Unlike other skills, the art of drag flicking needs as partner, or
should I say, a team even to practice. See I do get up early in the
morning and train in flicking hundreds of balls into the goal. It
gives me great joy and I always get satisfaction after a hard day of
work out. But unless you have the `pusher’ and the PC stopper working
with you in tandem, it is not a perfect work-out.

Because of my team, I have scored the hat-trick. They have earned the
short corner and my team during the set-piece drills have set-up the
short corner perfectly for me and I was able to score a hat-trick. So
its team work.

But after a long time, I am very happy. The coach is giving me special
duties of marking the danger man of the rival team and both the
matches I have done extremely well. Sometimes, you don’t get the
applause from the spectators. But the important thing is implementing
the plan by the coach and the motivation to win that matters.

Regarding the format, I think this is the best things for the players.
Now they will get exposure. More than the money, this will bring more
kids to hockey and overall the marketing of the game is going to give
us fantastic results.