BENGALURU: Well, there are no good ways to dress up this performance by the Indian men’s team. By the time the team in saffron had been thrashed by the team wearing a shade of blue, one couldn’t help but wonder if saffron also somehow prevented the players from executing simple passes.
Minutes before their crunch clash began, coach Craig Fulton spoke about the need to be watertight at the back.
Less than 15 minutes later, they were already two goals down against Argentina. A dream had died in the most predictable of ways. Lackadaisical defending. It has cost them all the tournament. Conceding sloppy goals — either from open play or from penalty corners — on the back of silly unforced errors.
By the time the hooter cut through the Wagener Stadium at Amstelveen, the World No. 8 were beaten two times. Once, on the field. And, one, off the field. They lost both the mental as well as the physical battle. The South Americans bullied them off the park. You don’t even need the proof of the final scoreline — 5-3 — to arrive at that conclusion.
The eye test itself was enough. India began the game knowing only a big win would keep them in the hunt. By the time the hour was over, many of the players couldn’t wait to get off the park and go back to the cold comfort of their hotel rooms to chew on another chance wasted in their own private space. When the team had assembled in the Netherlands at the beginning of the month — after a three-day sojourn to the Swiss Alps when they left India — there was genuine belief that this generation could deliver a World Cup for the first time in 51 years.
They had already shown at the Paris Games what they were capable of under this regime. It’s why that belief wasn’t misplaced. But this team picked the worst possible time to revisit ghosts of horrors past, especially in the way they defended as a unit.
Passes were routinely mishit, players made multiple costly mistakes in almost every game and there were also question marks over the fitness status of Jugraj Singh and, later in the tournament, Harmanpreet Singh. It’s a good thing that the International Hockey Federation (FIH) doesn’t compile statistics like ‘errors leading to goals’. If they did, India and their players would figure quite highly in that list.
Against the South Americans on Monday, for example, multiple errors led to goals. And it started when there was no Indian body on the far post and Lucas Toscani best HS Mohith to sound the board. It was too simple, like a goal in backyard hockey. Not a goal you would expect an elite team to concede in a virtual quarterfinals at the World Cup.
