Panakal Ruso Raphael is no stranger to the hockey world. This FIH Coach has trained the national teams of Singapore and Thailand, after producing n number of players for the Indian national team. He also had a stint of coaching in Macau of late. Raphael watched the first day’s action here in KL and his views will be a delight for connoisseurs of the game and hard core coaches alike.

The Netherlands looks to be the most balanced team. They create moves with swift interchanges upfront, which really confuse their rivals. Quick passing and clever off the ball running, help them for good results. They also have an uncanny knack of availing goals scoring chances. They are simply best at this, and here also such of their traditional strengths continued to flourish.

As a team, Germans were able to defend their goals by tactical possessional play. The idea of telling this here is to drive home a point to both India and Pakistan. They continue to resort to overhead passes to release the pressure. Occasionally this is ok, but not every time. I think these two teams over do over head passes. Both The Netherlands and Germany instead kept the ball possession for longer period to protect their lead. Certainly it worked to their advantage. Australians were also good, one need not elaborate on this. As long as one has the possession of the ball, you are never in a danger of conceding goals. It is as simple as that. India and Pakistan always lose possession and then get the feat or conceding goals.

The wining teams here are able to maintain the speed with flowing, overlapping moves and return passes. Their passes were either single or double touch passes, and thus the speed could be maintained all through. When you are overlapped, it is difficult to contain the situation. This was how the British was made to look like what they were so, on the opening day. While having the possession, GB team moved together to defend and also to attack. Ok every team does that. But while they were attacking, never utilized the opponents goaline. What do I mean by goalline? GB players were seen congesting in the striking area by themselves. They in fact made the defenders’ task easy by this, rather than let them toil for it. GB should have spread, and switched over fast to make their rival chase them, and thus gaining more space. In fact the GB were the losing side and should be doing this more often, but they were not.

Germany might have walked over Pakistan, but still I feel there is lot of room for them to improve, as they will be meeting stronger teams in the coming days. They need to effectively utilize the centre-midfield, especially when the ball is in possession with deep defence. Probably, they need a person of caliber in the mould of Michael Green to do that. That type of pivot role is missing now. To create more openings, continue to have a better free moves, just rotation on wings cannot suffice. They need to open more often than what we saw. Pakistan as usual did the things that excite the crowds, but made things easier for their rivals by playing too close to each other. Lateral and vertical switch overs were blocked, mere forward running is not going to solve any of their problems. Every one is running parallel, all towards the goal!

Note: This columnist will be giving his views on ongoing Champions Trophy in the coming days also.