Final Champions Challenge
camp begins

The ten-day final preparatory camp for the Champions Challenge in Kuala Lumpur, from December 7 to 15, began at the astro turf stadium in Madras on Saturday.

After missing the last six-day camp in Delhi, on account of illness, chief national coach Cedric D'Souza was back with the team.

The members of the team, which was announced on Thursday, and D'Souza arrived in Madras on Friday evening and got down to business early on Saturday morning.

IHF secretary K Jyothikumaran said Rajinder Singh, the coach of the junior World Cup-winning squad who was named coach of the Kuala Lumpur-bound team on Thursday after D'Souza took ill, will now be the standby coach. He clarified that Rajinder was named coach of the team as the IHF felt D'Souza, who is undergoing treatment for heart and spinal ailments, would not recover in time for the tournament.

The captain of the team will be named in a day or two and the team will leave for Kuala Lumpur on the night of December 3, the day the camp ends.

Speaking to newsmen after the day's session, D'Souza said: ''We want to ensure that old mistakes do not recur. We are working very hard on defence... to prevent conceding penalty-corners, as also on goal scoring. As usual we are also working on penalty-corners as well."

He said since most of the players, particularly those from the junior World Cup-winning team, are back in training after quite some time, emphasis is being laid on physical fitness.

He also informed that he is putting in extra efforts to fine tune some technical deficiencies of penalty-corner specialist Jugraj Singh, who was top scorer at the junior World Cup in Hobart.

Meanwhile, Jyothikumaran announced that D'Souza, assistant coach C R Kumar and former India coach and captain Vasudevan Bhaskaran will conduct a course for coaches in Tamil Nadu from December 1 to 3. Coaches from the Sports Development Authority of Tamil Nadu (SDATN), Sports Authority of India and other state-level coaches will attend the course. Some of the latest methods of coaching adopted by the IHF will be taught during the course.