India men’s hockey team ready for Asia Cup opener against China in Rajgir

Rajgir: For nearly half-an-hour, the Indian men’s hockey team waited on the turf under the hot afternoon sun unable to begin their practice session as their sticks were getting checked by the officials as is the norm ahead of a tournament.Safe to say it wasn’t something that they enjoyed doing but it certainly helped them get accustomed to the conditions because they will play the Asia Cup opener against China at 3pm at Rajgir Sports here on Friday.

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While on paper, India will be the overwhelming favourites, China won’t make it easy for them with Dutchman Michel van den Heuvel as their coach. He has previously coached the Dutch men’s national team, Pakistan men’s team and, very recently, was the coach of the Belgian men’s national team till the Paris Olympics.China have also brought in former India coach Roelant Oltmans into their setup and the Dutch duo will surely have something up their sleeves to trouble the Indians.India, though, are ranked seventh in the world and have dominated the Asian tournaments in recent years. They won the Asian Champions Trophy twice in a row and, playing with a junior side, finished third in the last Asia Cup. They also won the Asian Games in 2023.

However, India are coming into the tournament after a terrible outing in the European leg of the FIH Pro League where they lost seven matches in a row. But after that the team regrouped, trained together in Bengaluru for six weeks and coach Craig Fulton sounded quite happy about how it turned out.

“We had a really good training camp. We had a lot of good meetings about it. We put a lot of emphasis on tactics in terms of how to get more balls into the 25 (yards), more balls into the D to create more scoring chances which then would help us be a bit more effective on the scoreboard and obviously defending,” said the coach during a press conference here on Thursday.To assess themselves and to get the necessary match practice ahead of this tournament, the Indian team then went to Australia where they played four games against the hosts and Fulton believes it was just the right kind of preparation.“It was competitive. We were focusing on all the tactical things that I discussed previously. We also wanted to get the players up to speed against a really strong opposition and a strong running team.

Because with Asian hockey, it’s also man-to-man and you need a lot of good running skills,” he added.Meanwhile, captain Harmanpreet Singh, who missed a few games in Europe due to injury, sounded quite confident ahead of the event. Not only was he free flowing during the press conference but also during the practice session where he worked on his drag flicks, with Jugraj Singh by his side, and was on target on most of the occasions.The fans, who are expected to turn up in numbers on Friday, will surely love to hear this and will be eager to see it, too, on Friday when the hosts begin their campaign.Meanwhile, the opening match of the day will see Malaysia take on Bangladesh, followed by the match between defending champions South Korea and Chinese Taipei. Japan and Kazakhstan will then face off in the third game before the big match.