This time the Sultan Azlan Shah invitational hockey tournament will have more importance for Indian hockey than it had before. For it will be the first tournament for new coach Paul van Ass and starts the process of build-up towards 2016 Rio Olympics for which India have already booked a berth. He was appointed the coach in January but took charge of the team in the middle of March only and after spending a fortnight with the team, Paul feels that the team needs to improve on ‘off the ball’ aspect of the game, the style of play that has made Germany a force to reckon with.
“It is about putting yourself into good positions without the ball. Many people focus just on the movement with the ball and that is not so important. If you have a game of hockey for 60 minutes and you have the ball for 2 minutes, what you do in the rest 58 minutes is vital.
“So it is about being in a better position, not to be too flat at the back, finding good angles and ensuring the distance between the next line or the next player isn’t too much. That’s an art which shouldn’t be underestimated. Germans are the best at this. That’s the change that needs to come in,” van Ass said before the final practice session in India with the team leaving for Malaysia on Thursday.
Five-time winners India join Australia, New Zealand, Korea, hosts Malaysia and Canada in the competition.
India’s campaign starts against South Korea on 5th April followed by New Zealand the next day. Men in Blue then take on hosts Malaysia in Ipoh on 8th of April and Canada, the lowest ranked team in the tournament, a day later. India cap off their round robin campaign on 11th April against mighty Australia who would seek revenge after being humbled in their own backyard last year.
Managing the side for the past fortnight, Paul reflected that he liked the way the team has been playing and won’t be tinkering much with the style ahead of the tournament. “It is tough to say (on improvement areas) because it is a process. I like the way Indians play hockey, the give-and-go style which is always nice and fantastic to watch. Only in this process, they sometimes lose the ball and then it becomes dangerous.
“So what I want to do is to see that attacking play but also have that counter control because then you play fantastic hockey but end up with zero points.”
Paul, who carried Netherlands to silver medals at 2012 london Olympics and 2014 World Cup, had on his first day talked of language being a concern but two weeks later, he didn’t find it a barrier — at least not on the pitch. “The nice part is that even though I don’t speak Hindi or Punjabi, on the pitch we have same kind of language. So off the pitch we may not understand a word of each other but on it we have an understanding.”
Going into the Azlan Shah Cup, which India skipped last year and won in 2010, van Ass has decided not to keep a positional target in mind while remaining focused on improving the standard of play. “There are some teams who are better ranked than us and some lower ranked than us, so it’s a good balance. The players want to ask for my opinion and show themselves off which makes it a chance for everyone. We see this as a beginning. “At the Azlan Shah (Cup), everything is important and we’ll take one game at a time. For me the most important is to see what we’ve learnt and then use it forward. To be honest, you can’t set targets. We want to win every match, every tournament but realistically I’m more interested in the process and then repeat our victories to see why we’re getting those victories. That is more important than a win at times,” he quipped.