India's canada tour

[ssp]

Good to see another win, but the best statistic is the PC count- 6-0 in our favour. OK the conversion was nil, but if we win more PCs than we concede, we are going to win more matches. On another day, Sandeep could have converted 2-3 of these chances and then we would be looking at a big win.

Quite a lot of the PCs we concede are really stupid errors due to panic defending (lifted clearances or crazy stick tackles) or awful trapping. At the other end, our forwards are unable to win enough PCs- usually because they too panic once in the D by taking shots from acute angles or fail to find a 'convenient foot' of a defender. PCs have been so harmful to us in the past.

[Atithee]

This is a cause for concern unless these were for penalty shootouts to determine a winner (I don't think there were any shootouts in this series). The concern is either more of stupidity or giving the (with assumed or proven bias against India) referees more chances to penalize us than we merit. We need a coach like the 49ers' Singletary who will chew out even senior and star players for stupidity in earning game changing penalties for the team.

Very consistent performance from India in this series. While we haven't been able to blow them out, we have almost never trailed in this series (except perhaps for 5-10 minutes in one of the matches). Also, Canada has hardly been able to score from either field goals or PCs. Seems like half their goals have come from penalty strokes with the exception of the game in which we panicked and let come back from 4-1 to tie the game.

[ssp]

Last game tied at 2-2 after 45 mins.
We seem to have reverted to conceding PCs. Both Canadian goals off PCs and we didn't win any PCs in the 1st half.
As usual, soon as I follow any Indian hockey game live, we concede straight away! We were 2-1 up when I last checked.

[jayakris]

We won 3-2 in the nd, ssp. Relax ...

All said and done, this was an encouraging tour with a 6-0-1 mark on the tour. Any loss would have made us worry, really. Canada may only be a marginal top-15 quality team, but we stayed ahead almost all through the 7 matches and was behind or tied only for very few minutes out of over 500 minutes of hockey!

Not sure if we fixed all our problems, but we must have made a start at least.

Jay

[ssp]

Good to see we didn't ease up after having won the series. Apart from the 4-4 draw in the 3rd game we did very well.
Hopefully, this is a start of better things to come.

[jaydeep]

Yes, overall good result that showing we r travelling towards right direction.

[arjun2761]

Yes, it is worth noting that under Brasa we have generally done better at the end of these bilateral match series than we have done in the past. Even against Belgium, Spain, Holland etc. we did much better in the subsequent matches after a disastrous first match loss. In contrast, when we went to Argentina, we did really well to win the first 2 matches but lost the last 2 matches pretty decisively.

Hopefully, this means that we are learning more from these trips than the opponents are learning about us.

[PKBasu]

Yes, good steady results throughout the series. We should always be beating Canada, and I'm glad we did win 6 matches and drew only one -- especially since it was on Canadian soil.

[jayakris]

The scores from the series -- 2-0, 4-3, 4-4, 2-0, 3-1, 3-1, 3-2
We scored 21 goals and allowed 11 in the seven matches.

I like the 11-4 margin in the last four matches after the "panic" match where we cracked and allowed them to tie us with 3 goals in the last few minutes.

I would have liked us to have scores 4 or 5 more goals in the series, but except for 5 minutes in game three, our defense seems to have held up very nicely, allowing 8 other goals in seven games.

On thing to notice also was that we always seemed to be ahead and seemed to show very good spirit in going back ahead whenever Canada tied us (again, except game 3 where we didn't get time after the back defense screwed it up).

Jay