India should address weak points before Athens qualifier

Throughout the 25th Champions Trophy, the Indian team was inconsistent. There are still number of grey areas, which have to be addressed before next year's Athens Olympics that is twelve months away.

There was much expectation from this team prior to the tournament, having won two Championships at Sydney and Hamburg.

Admittedly, the team was under pressure.

In the end, it turned out to be a nightmare tournament for coach Rajinder Singh and the players. The team had enough in reserve but the talent in the Indian team was not fully utilised in Amstelveen.

The entire team's performance was well below 50 per cent. And the disgusting and the ironical part is that most of the time we were at the receiving end. At no point in the championship did we look like gaining in confidence.

The tournament has definitely given the opportunity for the Indian Hockey Federation to think about the future of the game in India.

Of course, there were plenty of good performances from the energetic youngsters like goalkeeper Devesh Chauhan and strikers Gagan Ajit Singh, Prabhjot Singh and Deepak Thakur.

Going by their individual performances they will go from strength to strength. Also, Jugraj Singh, hopefully with a little more authoritative play in the midfield, would become an integral part of Indian team for many years.

But the strategy employed by this team in all the matches needs to be probed.

I am shocked to see the duty given to Viren Rasquinha and Bimal Lakra in the midfield. They surely lacked the individual brilliance both in attack and defence.

At this high voltage competition it was visible that the two linked players have failed to deliver the goods for the major part of the tournament.

Rajinder has to work on this strategy at least in future camps and tournaments. Even the contributions of the experienced Baljit Singh Dhillon and Dhanraj Pillay, except for the India-Pakistan match, were not encouraging.

The strategy and plan by Rajinder has to be implemented by the players throughout the game and there must be an effort to implement at least 60 per cent of the game plan. Also the wing play was missing throughout the tournament.

To my mind India played their best in the very first game against The Netherlands and if they would have secured the three points, the team would have certainly improved upon the performance and the story would have been entirely different.

Conceding two goals in last five minutes against the hosts proved to be a major setback to the Indian team. It not only denied them crucial points but also dealt a psychological blow from which the team never recovered. The morale of the team was shattered and the players were as usual unprofessional, true to the Indian culture, not to overcome the setback. This resulted in continuous bad patches on the performance of the team.

It is difficult to rate the Indian team right now prior to Athens, as there will be pre-Olympic competitions where we will play teams like Spain, Canada, New Zealand and Poland, who are equally good. These teams will be waiting to expose the weak links of the Indian team based on this Champions Trophy performance.

Only a concrete plan and determined hard work will help us to show the true colours of the Indian team. But it will not be difficult for India to qualify for the Olympics as the team has enough calibre.

I believe there are many youngsters available in the junior ranks and also at the academies who will be worth a try before the Athens qualifying tournament. Rajinder Singh will also be able to tryout many other options.

The system of selecting the players to represent the country should be made more efficient. A player has to be selected based on all the angles and made to sweat at every point to don the Indian colour and not merely selected to be with the team only for training.

Overall, the 25th edition of Champions Trophy witnessed an exhibition of grand hockey played by the six top nations in the world.

Without doubt, hosts The Netherlands once again proved to be totally dominant and rightly took the first spot beating the Australians in the most emphatic manner in the final.

The nine-day competition saw 18 matches being played in which an amazing 125 goals were scored. More amazing was the fact that of these 76 goals were field goals while 43 came through penalty corners.

The statistics show that all the teams were very cautious in the first half and only during the second session the game was wide open which made it very interesting in all the matches.