Hockey World Cup – Analysis

It is over 3 weeks now that the Hockey World Cup played in India is over. One has had lot of time to sit back and reflect.

It was for the first time that I had the opportunity to witness a full tournament being played on Astroturf, in a stadium where the top teams of the world were on display. It was encouraging to see spectators in large numbers and stadium almost full to capacity specially on the days Indian team was playing. Also the public now knows first hand about our team’s short comings and the wide gap that exists between us and specially the European teams.

Glaring Differences

Physical Fitness : our claim of being physically fit may be justified to an extent. But physical fitness is a relevant term. We may be physically fit against teams that play at our pace like Pakistan, Malaysia but when the pace of the match is dictated by the opponents, we are not physically fit. In this tournament Australia was the team to watch as far as setting the pace of a match was concerned. In the match against us they set a furious pace with which we could not cope. If we can’t keep pace with opponents for the entire duration of 70 minutes we are not fit. Therefore our claim of being fit against all the teams is in doubt.

Australia’s super fitness was evident from the fact that it always had 5-7 players in attack and defence. At times I use to wonder that are they playing with II players or more.

Skills

Our claim that Indian players are skillful is a thing of past. Let us first identify skills that come into play.

– Stopping

– Receiving

– Deflection

– Accurate pushing, scooping and hitting.

– Scoring

– Execution of set-pieces

Then there are mental skills that relate to reading the game, anticipation and being at the right place at right time.

Out of these in which skill are we better than most of the teams. This difference was evidently clear during the world cup. Also a player must be able to perform his skills for the entire 70 minutes. A player may be able to execute skills when practicing these skills but that is of no use if he can’t repeat these in match situations. What is required is the ability to execute skills under pressure.

Conceding Soft Goals

The Indian team was badly let down repeatedly by its weakness of letting in soft goals; sometimes against the run of play. Number of goals were scored against us by an opponent player standing next to our goal post and deflecting the ball in from a free hit or a slap shot pass from outside the ‘D’. This they could do in spite of the fact that we had 5-6 players and the opponents had 2-3 players in our ‘D’.

The reason for these soft goals was poor positioning by own players. We lay more emphasis on marking space than marking the opponent players. Remember it is the player and not the space that will score a goal. Marking space so that the ball does not reach a designated opponent is important but marking the player who is going to receive that ball is even more important.

The opposite of this is our inability to score unexpected goals as compared to other teams. Our scoring is poor and needs radical improvement.

Lack of Self Confidence

Due to lack of confidence in self and fellow players we cannot control the game and thereby the pace of the game. Lack of confidence is the result of lack of skills under pressure. Our this weakness was very well exploited by Australia in the league phase. If one recollects that match, Australians started the match with ‘full court press”; a term borrowed from basketball. They put multi pressure on the player in possession of the ball and forced him to commit a mistake and thereby losing possession of the ball.

Poor Strategy and Tactics

We had no strategy and therefore no worthwhile tactics to put that strategy to use. Strategy against various teams depends on the strength and weaknesses of each team. Tactics to implement that strategy would require both physical and mental skills. We were poor at both of these. We need to threadbare analyse each and every tournament / match in detail to formulate our tactics and strategy to be better prepared for coming events.

Change in Rules

All the rules of the game that have undergone change in the recent past have suited other teams and have made the game faster and power packed.

The recent change in rule of self start is good for the game from spectators point of view. It has made the game interesting, much faster & resulted in more number of goals being scored.

But this rule change is a great disadvantage to India. It has placed more demand on physical fitness as there is no breathing time. Also players are required to think on their feet where our players are always found wanting.

Variety in Game Plan

The Indian team keeps on playing predictable stereotype hockey. Our strategy and tactics do not change from team to team; in fact we hardly have any strategy or tactics. For variety in our approach we have to study and analyse each and every match played.

There were a number of lessons to be learnt from this World Cup. But the question is “Will We”? if we go by past experience nothing much is going to change. Will someone sit down and reflect. High time we did.