BHUBANESWAR: When Belgium’s Arthur van Doren is in the middle of explaining how the country climbed up the ladder of success, it suddenly hits you. Their World Cup squad contains three Golden Generations. “The generation of Florent van Aubel, Simon Gougnard, Loick Luypaert and Tom Boon were the European U-18 champions,” Van Doren says.
“My generation (Alexander Hendrickx, Emmanuel Stockbroekx and Nicolas de Kerpel being the others) were European U-18 and U-21 champions. These two generations got through to the senior team and were already getting good results... now, we have a third set of players, led by Arthur de Sloover, here.”
After the Red Lions played their first match against Canada, they lost John-John Dohmen after he was diagnosed with eosinophilic pneumonia. His replacement, in a nutshell, captures the very essence of the work done by the Royal Belgian Hockey Association with respect to investing in youth programmes.
Dohmen, 30, has played 367 games. Augustin Meurmans, 21, may lack the experience but he hasn’t made one wrong tackle in the last two weeks. Replacing your most experienced athlete would have been a cause for concern for most. For Belgium, though, that’s never a problem. Not when they have loads of talent at their disposal.The 18 men proved it on Saturday with a 6-0 demolition job over England in the semifinals.
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A couple of weeks to go before the World League Final in Raipur in 2015, Shane McLeod gathered his staff and players to bounce a few ideas. The newly-appointed Kiwi coach had been toying with a thought: changing the defensive structure from a man-marking one to a zonal one. It was a smash hit, with the team reaching the final.
Even though they had reached a final at the World League Semi-Finals six months ago, this was progress. Rivals have had three years and 100s of hours of footage to decipher their zonal-structure but there has still not been a credible threat to it. In fact, if anything, a few of the other elite teams have copied the World No 3. “We tried it for the first time in Raipur,” McLeod said after the semifinal. “We were experimenting with different systems and this one seemed to work best. We got to the Olympics final with the same zonal system. And there can be no greater compliment to our work when other teams ape our defensive structure.”
England’s Danny Kerry may have been on the receiving end of a shellacking but he said McLeod’s men had changed the face of world hockey. “The game goes in waves,” he said. “Probably the Belgians started the zone a few years before Rio (Olympics). Till then, people were playing man-to-man and all of a sudden you had a team that played zone so you didn’t know how to defend it.”
The 24-year-old Van Doren, who won the World Player of the Year in 2017 playing in that zonal system, pointed out how other teams have looked at their structure to borrow from it. “In the beginning, Australia, Germany and Spain were playing man-to-man. Once we came with our zonal style, everyone said it’s not going to work. If you look at how many people play zone now, it does work. The two teams that were in the Olympic final played zonal. I think a lot of teams took elements of how we looked at the game... we showed them how to play zonal.”
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The defender also reveals how the squad has coped as hope changed to expectation because of their ludicrous rise as a powerhouse. “We are very ambitious,” he says. “We are more critical to ourselves than the outsiders are. Maybe that’s what we didn’t have in the past. We can deal with criticisms and deal with people that underestimate us or criticise us.”
That statement can be misconstrued but the defender says the team always welcomes criticism as long as it’s constructive. His answer also speaks volumes about how the sports media have started taking an active interest in covering hockey. “I think it goes back to what I said before,” he says. “We came here to do well and not lose in the quarterfinals. If that (losing against Germany) would have happened, the Belgian press would have criticised us, which is normal because we would have been very disappointed ourselves. I don’t think those expectations put us under pressure because we are doing that to ourselves anyway.”
How the Bloemendaal-based athlete views the quest for eternal growth in the sport is a view representative of the small European nation. “I look at what people do when presented with choices on the hockey turf,” he says. “How they make body feints, how they execute certain dribbles and so on. I try to implement that in my game to continuously grow. In this game, even if you are standing still, you are going backwards. If you stop, they will outrun and outplay you. You have got to keep going to be successful.”Van Doren and 17 others are 60 minutes away from being that.
In the memory of father
After the resounding victory, each and every player in red went up to Simon Gougnard and hugged him. A few were fighting tears while others, like Tom Book, were crying. The last 24 hours had been a testing time as Gougnard had lost his father. “It was difficult,” captain Thomas Briels said. “His father was already very sick. But Gougnard really wanted to play. We dedicate the victory to his father. Today, our memories are with him.”
7 No of goals Alexander Hendrickx has scored in this tournament.
5 No of FIH finals Belgium have reached in the last four years.
11 Belgium had a total of 11 shots on goal against England on Saturday.