HWL display a wake-up call, says Roelant Oltmans

Bengaluru: After the monumental success of 2016 that held much promise for the Indian men’s hockey team, 2017 has been turbulent thus far. On the back of a glorious FIH Champions Trophy silver medal during their last visit to the United Kingdom, Roelant Oltmans’ men came to the Hockey World League semi-finals enthused, looking to set the world stage alight again. 

However, a timid sixth place finish sealed by losses to lower-ranked Malaysia and Canada, and controversy off the field have put Oltmans’ plans through the wringer.

“Of course I’m not satisfied with the final result. Our finishing was not up to the standard we wanted. We have enough time to rectify it.

Everything went smoothly in the past 10 months or so and now we’ve had a setback.  I call it a wake-up call,” the Dutch coach said at a press conference at the Sports Authority of India’s southern centre on Friday.

The loss to Malaysia in the quarter-finals after a semi-final defeat at the Sultan Azlan Shah Cup just weeks earlier, hurt the most. “If you look at the statistics from that game, we should have won. We didn’t do the counter control well. We gave them too much space on counter-attacks and that led to a number of penalty corners,” the 63-year-old noted.

The world no. 6 side got off to a bright start in the UK, notching up three wins on the trot before falling to the mighty Netherlands. It was at this juncture that acrimony struck. 

The ghost of midfielder Sardar Singh’s alleged past returned to haunt him, as he was called in for questioning by police in Leeds over a long-standing sexual assault case. Did it affect the mentality of the side? Oltmans certainly thought so.

“Mentally we try to take it away, but what do you think will happen when a player has to travel for 11 hours by car, during the night to a police station, answer questions for a couple of hours and come back? We knew it would affect our match with Holland since it was the next day,” the coach bemoaned.

Injuries to custodian P.R. Sreejesh and key drag-flicker Rupinder Pal Singh before the tournament also put a spanner in the works. Penalty corner conversion fell on the shoulders of 20-year-old starlet Harmanpreet Singh; a burdensome responsibility indeed. There is solace in the fact that India are in the World Hockey League finals by virtue of being hosts. It stands to reason that this might have affected the approach of the Men in Blue. 

“You see that the teams that really had to fight for it, in that last fighting spirit, they were maybe a little bit better than we were. Did that (prior qualification) affect us?I try to prepare them like it’s not but maybe somewhere in the back of your mind, it’s there,” Oltmans said.

India will have their mettle tested again with friendly matches against Holland and Belgium in August, before returning home to train for October’s Asia Cup — a competition of interest to the embattled Oltmans.