How well is the team prepared for the Commonwealth GamesIJ
We have been working pretty hard in the last few weeks since the World Cup. We rush to Glasgow early on Sunday and then get ourselves ready to play in about 20 degrees temperature.
India have Australia, Scotland, Wales and South Africa in their pool. Who do you think can be a major problemIJ
Australia is the biggest team in our pool obviously. South Africa is always difficult when it comes to a tournament. We will play them towards the end of the tournament. Our first two games are against Wales and Scotland. It’s all about improving hockey as we go through the first stage and our objective is to finish in the top-2 and move into the next stage.
Is Indian team good enough to win the gold medal or we should be satisfied with a semi-final spotIJ
My view is that we should look to improve. At this point I don’t think we are good enough against Australia on paper, I think we are good enough to take on England. We are good enough to take on New Zealand which is the other top team in the other group. but to me it’s a matter of performing well and rising and I think the important part in tournaments like these is that a team should look to continue to keep growing.
What is the target that you have set for the teamIJ
The target is improvement.
Is there any benchmarkIJ
No I don’t use benchmarks because I think that’s predicting what’s going to happen, I am not a gambler.
India always concede goals in the last minutes of a match. Do you think it is a big problemIJ
I think that is an issue we had in our first 2 games at the World Cup. We managed to curb that problem in the latter part of the tournament. We have worked on it but it is certainly an issue. It’s an issue with relationship to understanding what we need to do. We have handle that reasonably well and I am reasonably comfortable with where we are with it. We don’t consider that as a big issue.
Taking the team’s performance the example at the World Cup, any special areas that you have worked onIJ
We have been working hard on bringing some power into the front zone into the scoring side. We have been working a lot on being able to control the game itself, ensuring that we don’t give away careless possession when we don’t need to. Controlling the game and controlling where we are, these are the two big areas that have been looking at. Conceptually, we have been looking at how we bring the ball out of the backfield and into the midfield. That’s been the real focus and that is what we had time to do over the last few weeks.