After qualifying for the Rio Olympics, following a 36-year wait, Indian women’s hockey team will look to make the most of this golden opportunity to come up with an eye-catching performance it the Brazilian capital.
However, does the present squad have what it takes to replicate the fourth place finish managed by the team of 1980 in the Moscow OlympicsIJ The survivors of that historic team have their say in it.
Eliza Nelson and Selma D’Silva, part of the 1980 Olympic squad, believe it will take an out of the box performance for the team to repeat the performance. So they both believe the realistic target for the nation would be a quarterfinal finish. “In order to repeat the fourth place finish, it would take an out of the box performance. Quarterfinal would be a good thing. Once they qualify from the group anything can happen from there,” Selma said.
Whereas, Eliza said: “It is going to be tough finishing in top-4 even though they had good exposure. I hope they put up a good fight. They should enter quarterfinal. If they win three out of five group games, they can make it out of the group.”
Selma infact mentioned the matches India should primarily target on winning in the group stage in Rio.
India is placed in Group B along with Argentina, Australia, Great Britain, Japan and United States. The competition formats will have each team initially playing round-robin games within their group, after which the top four teams from each group advance to the quarter-finals.
D’Silva, who captained the Indian side during the 1983 Woman’s World Cup in Kuala lumpur, feels the country should somehow win their matches against Japan and United States.
“Japan and United States are beatable, we should target those two. Argentina and Australia will be a tough fight, however India should also target Great Britain, which is also a good team,” she explained.
On the other hand, Nelson is not exactly sure what team United States will be putting forth. “India have played them recently and they do know about US. However, we are not sure which team they will have it then. The team should take one game at a time and should focus on winning it,” said the former player from Maharashtra.
Defender Sushila Chanu will be leading the 16-member squad and Deepika will be the vice-captain. Despite the squad having only one goalkeeper in Savita, they have good strength in depth in the other positions. The squad has a good mixture of youth and experienced players and they will bank on each other tocome up with a good outing.
Also playing together for a long time will be the side’s biggest strength, says Selma. “They have been playing together for a long time. They have also gone out and played — they have that advantage,” she said.
However, the main weakness the former Olympian believes India have is in converting penalty corners. “India are lacking in the conversion of penalty corners. We are lacking in converting and finishing the PC’s,” said D’Silva.
India’s showing over the last few years, have improved considerably. The team finished in the top at the 2014-15 Women’s FIH Hockey World league Semi-finals and stunned Japan 2-1 to win the bronze medal at the 2014 Asian Games. However, India have not done well in the recent past, losing their last three series.
Add to that, captain Ritu Rani was dropped from the squad by the selectors due to poor form and attitude problems. On Ritu being dropped, Selma said: “It is unfortunate that Ritu has been dropped near Olympics.”
On the other hand, Eliza labeled the entire episode as ‘very sad’, but she remains surprised that how no support staff where there to offer the 24-year-old any counseling. “That is a very sad episode to what happened. They could have kept a watch on her and counseled her earlier itself when they know she was going off-track and not concentrating on the game. They could have counseled her — there are so many support staffs. Someone should have taken her aside and guided her correctly,” she said.
But the newly appointed captain Chanu is an experienced campaigner, who has more than hundred international matches under her belt. She was also the skipper of the junior Indian team in 2013. Under her, the Indian team won a bronze medal at the Junior World Cup held in Germany.
The former Olympians also gave thumbs-up to the new captain. “She (Chanu) has been with the team for a while, so it won’t be a problem,” said Selma.
However, she said Ritu will be missed, but still feels no one is indispensable in the squad.
“Ritu will be missed to an extent, but nobody is indispensable. They would have trained for a while now without her, so the team can cope with her absence,” she added.
Selma, who was part of the squad that won the Gold medal at the 1982 Asian Games, believes the change in format is one of the reasons for the team not being able to qualify for Olympics for 36 years.
“The format of qualification system was different then to how it is today. But, we should leave that behind now and take pride in the fact that the team has qualified for Olympics this time and must hope to do well in future Olympics also,” she said.
In order to prevent the team from taking another 36 years to qualify for Olympics in the future, she feels the country should have a good plan in place. “They should have a four-year plan and start looking for next Olympics now itself. We should focus on junior level and concentrate on grassroots and school level and train them. The process has to be started now itself,” said the former captain.
However, she feels the main way to make India a regular at Olympics is by targeting the Asian Games.
“India need to win the gold medal in Asian Games and dominate Asia, with which they can also qualify for Olympics,” she said.
Echoing her views, Eliza said: “We have won other tournaments in that period, but not the Asian Gold. We have to get back the Gold medal in the Asian Games.”
India’s hockey matches can be seen live in Star Sports — the ‘Official Broadcast Partner’ of the Rio 2016 Olympics.