Asian Games 2014 - Incheon

[Ayush1234567]

We should finish at 8th with Thailand and DPR Korea Moving Ahead Of Us.We should finish 5th in overall Tally.

Indian Mens Vollyball team are leading Qatar in the 5th Place Playoff 25-21 20-25 25-22 15-16

[jayakris]

But imagine how the rest of the Indian subcontinent feels now... Those 430 million people in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal have 1 Gold, 2 silvers and 8 bronzes. The worst area for sports in the world, by a long margin. The lone gold from that area is in (you guessed it!) -- women's cricket! The second gold will come later from Bangladesh or Sri Lanka in men's cricket. Whoop dee doo.

At least we are doing better than the rest of our cricket-affected subcontinental neighbors, and not too far behind the 350 million people in Indonesia and Philippines who have 5 golds, 8 silvers and 20 bronzes - on a per capita basis.

[Ayush1234567]

So its 2-2

[Ayush1234567]

So India Finishes 5th in Volleyball.Good Performance especially against the defending champs Japan.

[Ayush1234567]

India's Asian Games Campaign Comes to An End.Many Positives From This Asian Games.Can anybody List Them?

[sameerph]

Yes, good performance in volleyball to finish 5th. We have pretty much established ourselves as 5th in Asia in volleyball in last few years. Now, need to do something to get ahead of big 4 in Asia-Iran, China, Korea & Japan and try to get a medal at Asian level to start with.

[jayakris]

Yes, good performance in volleyball to finish 5th. We have pretty much established ourselves as 5th in Asia in volleyball in last few years. Now, need to do something to get ahead of big 4 in Asia-Iran, China, Korea & Japan and try to get a medal at Asian level to start with.

You are right. We have quite clearly established ourselves as THE 5th team in Asia, and are probably a bit under-ranked at #39 in the world. We still can't do anything about world #10 Iran, who would beat us with their eyes closed, every damn time. We can give a little fight now and then to #16 Korea and #17 China, but would lose to them too. We have done well against #21 Japan a few times in the recent past, and came very close at this Asiad to upsetting them in 5 sets when we fell 13-15 in the 5th set. But beating #36 Thailand earlier and #45 Qatar today meant that the volleyball team tried their best and got to their well-deserved 5th spot in Asia. We are probably a #30 team in the world, and have probably moved up some 10 odd spots in recent years. We still need a further improvement to be Asian medal contenders, but that would not be easy to accomplish either.

[sameerph]

Will these wins over Thailand and Qatar help us improving our ranking ?

Yes, it is very difficult to get ahead of China or Korea or even Japan on consistent basis. Probably will need at least 1-2 ultra talented players to come up in out team or some long term sustained grass root level improvement, I suppose.

[jayakris]

Will these wins over Thailand and Qatar help us improving our ranking ?

I don't think so. The rankings of the opponents certainly do not matter. The FIVB rankings are all based on standings at the (very few) specified tournaments. I believe they only use the Asian volleyball championships standings for the rankings and not the Asiad standings.

[sameerph]

Yes, North Korea won the table tennis mixed doubles gold and move ahead of us.

But, Uzbekistan lost 1 of the boxing finals. So, they cannot go ahead of us now.

Only, Thailand left now. 1 boxing final and 1 contender in Taikwando SF left for them now.

Thailand got gold in boxing. So, they go ahead of us and we are now in 8th position. Looks like that is where we will finish. As I said a few days before, 12 golds would have taken us to the 6th position. We fell 1 short. 2 clear missed golds by Saurav Ghosal and in tennis mens doubles cost us the ranking.

But, it just acedemic really. 1-2 spots here and there in the ranking does not really matter and does not indicate much in terms of overall development.

[sameerph]

In total medals, we are at 57 which is about 3 short of comparable number last time (64 - 8 for chess/cue sports/roller sports +4 for compound archery this time). Not much of a difference. I think we missed a whole lot of athletics medals due to large number of African imports this time. I will try to make a summary sometime later about our athletics performance in the context of these African imports.

The real areas of concern are mens boxing and recurve archery. These are the 2 sports where we are or were close to Olympic medal standard in last few years. Not a single performance of that level in Asian is certainly bad.

We had 2 golds , 3 silver and 2 bronze medals in mens boxing last time. Against that we have only 2 bronze medals this time which is a big comedown.

In recurve archery, we had 1 silver and 2 bronze medals last time and none this time.

[gbelday]

Thanks Sameer for all your work. I am a little concerned about Shooting as well. We seem to be regressing. And Yes, we got to get our act together in Boxing and very disappointed with Archery. I thought we have a Korean coach, no? Why have we regressed so badly there?

I was hoping we'd finish in the top 8 but it's still disappointing nevertheless. We should aim to finish 5th (not just overall but also based on the gold tally).

[ankit1407]

As per some news reports Manju Bala's bronze medal in women hammer throw has been upgraded to silver after one of the chinese was tested positive during the test....

[sameerph]

Not yet updated on the official website. We will have to wait before putting the final medal tally even as some of these dope test results come out.

[ysh]

with the current situation, we're likely to end up with less than or just around 10 gold medals. We should be somewhere 8-9 on ranking or worse with that haul. Obviously total number of medals do not look like will be more than 65. Not a good performance, we just sled back. we didnt do better.

i think sport officials should resign when their contingent perform poorly. Incheon just took India back to 2006, thats when we had finished 8th. Looks like we just almost lost a decade of progress. When we should be moving ahead, we are sliding back.

Just as I had guessed, we ended up just around 10 gold medals & at 8th position like we did in 2006!. 6th position or better is a long way from here.