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Leading 4-1 with 23 mins of play left...

4-1 and we are looking good. We have a PC. Varun makes it 5-1. Excellent flick. This is much better than the Canada game.

Mandeep gets a yellow. Needless nonsense, but sort of expected cr*p from the umpire. Green was appropriate.
Finished 5-3 after a couple of own goals. Just as I predicted, rubbish umpiring and sloppy defending. We should have won this by 5-6 goals, but contrived to make it so much harder than necessary.
We will top our group and avoid a difficult QF.

Again a lapse of concentration in the final ten minutes as England scored two goals to reduce the lead .. We need to avoid this in big matches.

At Junior Hockey World Cup 2016, Lucknow, India

Group D
India bt England 5-3 (2-1)

We are tied 1-1 at half time against South Africa. South Africa have decent defense and are quite speedy in attack which we need to be beware of.

Our PC conversions have been poor so far in this world cup. 0 out of 2 today and most of the time it is the pushing and stopping which has let us down. With 2 decent PC exponents in Varun Kumar and Harmanpreet we need to do better.

A draw should be good enough for us to top the pool and even a loss by less than 3 goal margin would do.

But, we must win to keep the momentum going.

Another miss trap in PC. Our guys are not even getting to hit the PC's.

Still 1-1 with 18 mins to go.

Finally Mandeep has a good goal to take us ahead 2-1.

Finished 2-1. Have to be thankful for the win, but not great on PC conversions and shots on goal considering the number of circle entries.
Mandeep got the winner and MoM, but in my opinion he is messing a lot of good opportunities. We will need a much more clinical approach in the QF.
Belgium look like the strongest team. We lost to them in recent Valencia tournament.

In this match also our struggle on penalty corner conversion and in trapping continued ... I really hope this will not cost us in knock-out ... We r facing Spain in the quarter-finals.

We beat Spain twice at the Valencia tournament, but we conceded far too many PCs in both matches (some of these were due to usual umpiring nonsense). I hope we keep calm, avoid silly gifts and also keep 11 players on the pitch. It will be a tough match.

Decided to watch our QF v Spain and regretting it as we have been awful. We are 1-0 down at half time with all the usual stuff on display. Crap umpiring, useless trapping on the open stick side ( Mandeep has been even worse than normal), gifting away fouls and losing every single 50/50 ball. Passes are going astray and the over excitedness is painful to watch.

This is reminiscent of our 2013 JWC disaster. We will need some luck to turn this around because we look clueless in the final third of the pitch and our PCs have been a joke all tournament.

Spain have had 2-3 attacks, got a PC and as expected they scored off it. If they get a 2nd goal, we can say goodbye to our chances.

7 mins into the 2nd half and we are looking no better. Umpiring is still rubbish. Our trapping is laughable.

19 mins left and I can't see us scoring. Our players are making too many basic errors. Even the guys I have praised in the past have been abysmal- Harjeet, Arman, Gurinder, Sumit, Nilakanta. Why can't these guys at least stop the ball on the open stick side.

We level it off a PC rebound. Keep calm for the next 2-3 mins.

Yes, at last a PC converted by Harmanpreet to give us a 2-1 lead. 3 mins left. Come on guys. We hang on. Phew, what a horrible way to win. This is the worst I've seen this team play. The occasion seems to have got to a few of our players.

In the semi final, if we get an early lead, we may play calm composed hockey, but I don't want them to be chasing the game against the Aussies. Our PCs have been the biggest headache.

Phew, we finally got a win. I last checked we were down 0-1 in the middle of second half and had given up hope. I could not watch the match at all today. From your post it is clear that we did not play well and were lucky to get a win. I have seen this junior team play really well in couple of matches I saw in Europe and Australia recently. So, it is puzzling why they are not able to play at that level here. But, I would gladly take whatever scrappy win we get as it gets us to the top 4 of the world stage after a long time in the junior world cup, I think.

We were lucky today ... From the start we r saying, it looks this poor PC conversion rate can cost us in big matches, till now we managed to convert only 5 from 26 PCs.

I have a feeling that we will play better against Australia in the SF. The pressure of expectation will be less now that we have reached the SF at least and the Aussies will be the favoured side and we will be underdogs going into the match. Lets see.

Spain packed their defence and we lacked the skills or creativity to get shots at goal or even find space in the circle. Our forwards were fairly ordinary. All of them made basic errors in trapping or passing accurately.
This team has been excellent in doing the simple things properly. By this I mean, trapping, moving the ball around and keeping possession and then showing some lovely skills in attack. Yesterday, most of this was missing. We would have had an easier night if the PCs had been working. Direct flicks weren't working so a variation or deflection should have been tried.
Let's hope we get a much better performance today.

Good to see the team win and make the SF!

It appears that they aren't playing at the their best but still showing some grit in maintaining an all win record. Hopefully, they will add two more wins!!