Rabobank Hockey World Cup,Hague,Net., May31-June 15. 2014

[Omkara]

ah man... I have been avoiding this thread coz it's too heartbreaking to follow Indian hockey these days...still dil hai hindustani... onto next match

[gautam]

Yesterday’s game was even more heartbreaking. With the kind of performance India gave against Belgium in the second half, I was expecting India to do well against England. Like ssp mentioned, England is an ordinary team however somehow the results have been going in their favour in the past few years. This was very evident in their yesterday’s play, with many mis-passes and ordinary trapping, I expected atleast a draw.

India began with a decent note, with England relying on counter attacks, the first 20 minutes saw India dominate the possession. However, there was no creativity in the mid-field and most of the attacks were either through the right flank or were relying on the long passes by Raghunath. Thus against the run of play, England managed to score and take the lead through the penalty corner. It was just bad goalkeeping by Sreejesh and the corner should have been saved (Just for the info, Ashley Jackson was injured and dint take the corner).

The second half saw an intense battle in the mid-field however both teams lacked creativity. Nonetheless, India still had a slight edge owing to the occasional brilliance by Sardar Singh. Unlike in the previous match against Belgium, India played with more self-belief and committed men forward with the hope of finding the winner. However, due to the foolishness of Yuvraj Walmiki who made a terrible tackle on Ashley Jackson, we conceded a penalty corner which resulted in the goal.

The worst players on the field easily goes to Yuvraj Walmiki with close second being SV Sunil, Lalit Upadhya and Akashdeep Singh, seems like our forwards are completely non-existent. Getting back the tried and tested forwards would have been a more sane option.
The stand out player without a doubt has to be Sardar Singh. If only, we had more players like these, the fortunes of our team would have been different.

[arjun2761]

Haven't seen this set of matches. However, in some of the prior matches I've seen, SV Sunil seemed to be our fastest forward with decent ball control and was pretty effective on the flanks. Disappointing to read that he is ineffective now -- perhaps as a result of an injury he sustained a couple of years ago.

[sameerph]

Yes, Sunil does not seem as effective as he usually is at least so far in this tournament. The only player who seems to have somewhat improved is Dharamveer who had a good game yesterday. Saradar, Gurbaj, Birendra, Manpreet have been good. However, at least 1 or 2 more rise up to the level of Sardara, it hard to consistently get upper hand against teams at this level.

[ssp]

Agree with most of the recent posts about the lack of quality in our team. I have been critical of our hopelessly inept forwards and defenders, although we are reasonable in the latter department, apart from Ragunath and the habit of losing concentration.

Sardar has been our best player ever since he appeared on the scene around 2007 (and arguably India's best ever synthetic era player). Gurbaj, too is quality and I like Birendra and Rupinder Pal. A couple of others- Manpreet and Kothajit can sometimes be good. Dharamvir has been awful, but I have to admit he has improved and has pace, skills and is physically ok. The rest are pretty poor. In one of my previous posts, i lamented the fact that our players do not develop with experience, but tend to go backwards. Sunil is a prime example of this. He has enough qualities (experience, pace and reasonable skills) but doesn't make much use of what he has got.

Some of the others are just maddeningly poor (rubbish would be more accurate) and frankly, are not going to make a difference in the future. Yuvraj, Uthappa and Akashdeep are pathetic. Weak, easily dispossessed and error prone. Many times in a match Sardar or one of the midfielders will do something brilliant and pass to one of the duffers upfront and these guys promptly lose the ball and there is a dangerous counter attack against us. These forwards do not press the opposition properly either and that makes the opposition look much better than they really are. Ramandeep is better than any of the forwards in this team and Chandi was looking good before his injuries. Sad to hear Lalit was poor yesterday because he has great stick skills....but nerves probably messed his game.

We desperately need to produce 4-5 quality players (3 of which have to be forwards) and the selectors need to banish the dross....permanently. This won't happen overnight, but the hope is the HIL and academies may unearth a few more talented players in the next year or two. Still we have to be thankful that we didn't go back to Sandeep and Danish and Nithin aren't here to bring the level down even further.

[prasen9]

Forget hockey. This is such a nightmare. We were 4th in football in the Olympics in 1956 and won the Asian Games twice, I think last in 1962. Ever since sports started using modern methods, we decided to sit back and regress. Do you think we will ever be good in football? It is time to give up on hockey similarly. Once the country's economy improves, we will see more investment and slow improvement. I am possibly super-disappointed and over-reacting, but, nothing will come out of hockey in the next 10 years. We are here because we are masochists.

[arjun2761]

Perhaps, we are masochists but hockey prospects are way different than soccer/football. In hockey, we are still in the top-10 while in soccer we are around 160th.
Furthermore, other than maybe Australia, Holland, and Germany, none of the other top hockey countries have well developed large professional set ups which we need to compete with as in the case of soccer. Both the international talent and professional training competition is way lower in hockey.

As noted by Sameer, we need to unearth 2-3 greater talents similar to Sardara which together with a more professionally trained pool of average players could make us competitive with the top-4.

[ssp]

Decided to suffer the full match replay against England. Some random observations:
1. Umpires are a big problem for us in tight matches. Why was a Scot chosen for a match involving England? Countless decisions went against us throughout the match. PCs that we should have got were denied. PS call was painful. I bet if we had appealed as the defending team the decision would have stood.
2. rash tackling is still costing us dearly
3. Our forwards are contributing nothing. All our chances are coming from 3 players- Sardar, Gurbaj and Dharamvir. The latter looked pretty good and I'm pleased to see that.
4. Walsh has made some improvements. We are holding the ball better and our defensive structure was better than the usual crap. Although this maybe because England aren't brilliant!
5. We didn't look as dumb as usual, but still too many silly errors and on another day we will be punished.

Our priority is to unearth many more players who can support 3-4 excellent players that we do possess. We need to start turning these close losses into draws and wins and move up the rankings.

[Sin Hombre]

Being 10th in field hockey is not much better than being 150th in football. Both rank in the bottom 3rd as far as countries actually interested in the sport.

[sameerph]

I don't think so. I would say in Hockey we are at about middle level among nations interest while in football we are among bottom one third among all playing nations (not just interested nations). Even in Asia, we are easily among top 3 in hockey with a chance to even be the top nation while in Football we are not in top 10.

I think except for top 3 nations ( Australia, Netherlands & Germany), the difference between others and us is not much and as I said before unearthing of 3-4 talented players like Sardara can take us in or at least close to top 4 and to olympic medal. In football, such possibility does not exist for perhaps next 50 years.

That is why still retain some hope for Hockey and keep following it while in football we are mostly following exploits of others.

[RohitG]

I agree with Sameer. At least on face value, think about this from a modern day perspective (ignore the 8 gold medals and the past achievements) We at least qualified for the hockey world cup. The disappointment is because the level has dropped compared to our glorious past. But again, we're still there. Football on the other hand, we are way behind. We're not even good at the Asian level. Our top I-league clubs play in the 2nd tier Asian tournaments. Yes, there is a difference between the two sports as far as number of interested countries is concerned. Perhaps that's part of the reason why we aren't so great at football. The most popular sport has more number of countries recognized in the sport than that in the United Nations. It has a global appeal in the true sense unlike cricket and hockey. So countries actually focus on having a good football team. That's where we fall behind. Many times when I watch India playing hockey, the referees have been incredulous to our appeals. The course of the match changes after that. I don't think we're that bad. Hope the guys win the next matches.

[Omkara]

Hockey>>>>>> better than football... but wonder why? we look tired on football field

[jayakris]

1-1 draw with Spain, just now.

[gautam]

The match against Spain was very tight as expected. The last time the two teams met, Spain ended up winning on penalty strokes. The match began with Spain dominating the possession and India preferring to keep men back just like they did against Belgium. However, Spain could not create many chances as they seem to be lack in quality upfront just like India. Against the run of way, we were awarded a penalty stroke for a rash tackle on Mandeep. Rupinder made no mistake and scored. Thereafter, Spain was all over India and managed to score an equaliser 2 minutes before the end of first half. Spain could have scored a few more if not for Sreejesh (though he dint have to do anything special and all the shots lacked quality but still credit to him).

The second half was full of mis-passes with Spain still dominating. However. India managed to get three penalty corners, two of them through Sardar. Out of the three, Sardar made a mockery of one with a wrong push, second one was a low push by Rupinder, easy save for keeper. The last one which was 3 minutes before the hooter, Raghu tried passing it to Rupinder but was too slow.

Analysis:
Contrary to popular opinion, we are still lacking in penalty corner. Rupinder or Raghu have not even tested the keepers properly. Sandeep would have been a better option if you ask me. However, the major difference between the two teams easily has to be the way both the teams strikers operated. Spain's strikers were putting pressure on Indian defense and winning the ball on crucial positions. Unfortunately same cannot be said for Indian strikers, i saw Yuvraj with the ball precisely three times in the whole match, SV Sunil except for the one pass hardly contributed and same goes for Akashdeep.

Indians seem to stick with the same strategy of trying to tackle pass through the defenders and entering the circle or relying upon the long passes. It is simple to figure out our stratergy. However, the options doesnt seem to have any other option considering the lack of quality strikers.

So we stay at 5th spot, maximum is 4 points which we can hope for provided we win against Malaysia (not counting Australia). Spain has to play Belgium and Malaysia. We can expect Spain to beat Malaysia so they might end up with 5 points. England and Malaysia are already ahead. So in all probability we will end up playing for 9-10th spot.

[arjun2761]

Relieved that we didn't concede a goal in the final minutes and managed to get a draw. I was actually hoping we win this game -- we are currently ranked higher than Spain.

Now, we need to beat Malaysia and hope Malaysia can at least tie Spain as that is the only scenario which gets us into the top-8.