BHUBANESWAR: Harendra Singh doesn’t do a good poker face because he is a man who shows his emotions at the drop of a hat. Good goal? Beaming from ear to ear. Bad miss? He could strangle a cow with his bare hands. On a balmy Monday morning at Kalinga Stadium, Surender Kumar could as well be the cow because he is baking the defender.
A skills-based training routine — take a touch before firing a cross from the right hand side across the goalkeeper — is underway. It sounds simple but Kumar, an experienced campaigner with over 100 caps, is overcome with stage fright. He has problems in trapping the ball as well as taking a perfectly weighted touch to deliver a pin-point cross.
After seemingly taking a long time to fire his cross a couple of times, Singh steps in. “No problems,” he says. “Take as much time, this is only the World Cup... where teams give you all the time you want.” Singh knows the importance of the defender. Most of India’s good work from an attacking perspective has come from his stick down the right, where he averages more than 30 passes a game. But the fine-tuning isn’t working out as Kumar takes time before firing in a cross which is so timid that the action seems to be happening in slow motion.
Singh has seen enough. He dials up the bad-cop act a notch. “This is the World Cup and I hope you realise that.” The 25-year-old inexplicably continues to struggle with the basics. Standing next to the penalty spot, the coach gives an exasperated sigh before walking up to him. Having exhausted all his theoretical patience, he borrows Kumar’s stick. There are no audio commands as he demonstrates how to trap before crossing the ball in one, slick move.
It belatedly brings the desired effect as Kumar finds the sweet spot. It even elicits a response from his coach. “Good job.” Later on, Mandeep Singh gets the same treatment. After missing a couple of deflections, Singh takes him behind the goalpost and explains the finer art of finishing.
Emphasis on refocussing
With just two days remaining for arguably the biggest matches in the lives of most of these players, now would be a bad period to go off the boil. From an Indian perspective, start hoping that Singh’s good-cop-bad-cop routine will be enough to help them refocus.
Thankfully, that’s been one of the Men In Blues’ stronger points: ability to ‘switch on’. At least that’s what analytical coach, Chris Ciriello, claims after a rigorous workout on Monday. “The big takeaway for me from the group stages is our ability to switch on,” he says. “We have played some good hockey, but in patches.”
One of the patches the ace drag-flicker is referring to came in the last match against Canada. With the score reading 1-1, the midfielders changed the momentum in the last quarter with their energy. That’s what Ciriello wants to see more of. “It’s about us doing what we need to. Once you get the structure that was in place in the fourth quarter, things flowed very easily. And when we flow as an Indian team, it is very difficult to keep us down.”
The one automatic downside to a team switching on in patches is whether they can afford to switch off for vast parts of the game.The Australian, to find out why some players are switching off in the first place, has been trying to approach it from a psychological perspective. “At the 2014 World Cup, I scored seven goals. It’s about stepping up at the right time. I ask guys why they have those feelings and why that happened (switching off during a match). It’s about being open, there’s no point hiding.”
Everything monitored
There is no point hiding to the strength and conditioning head, Robin Arkell, because he has all the data in his computer. As soon as he wakes up and switches on his computer, he has access to the sleep log of all the players the previous night. Not just that but whether the sleep was “sound or not.” His specialty, though, is designing training modules which will ensure the players are as fit as they possibly can be.
As the South African has a background in rugby, his training programmes have been borrowed from the sport to make India’s hockey stars ‘big, powerful athletes’. “Slightly, I think (have you borrowed from rugby),” he says.
“My background was in rugby so in terms of how I wanted to prepare the player, not much has changed... you wanted to prepare powerful, strong and fast athletes. When I arrived that’s what I was told Indians were lacking in.”On Monday, it looked they were all fit but a few failed in the execution of even the most basic of skills. Singh, Ciriello, Arkell & Co have a little over two days to work on those.
8 This is the eighth time India have made the last eight of the WC and only the second time this century.