India’s head coach Graham Reid said on Sunday the team needs a mental conditioning coach after the hosts lost to New Zealand in penalties in a crossover match to crash out of the hockey world cup. Reid’s comments could be an indication that his team was unable to deal with the mental aspect of the game, as the home side dominated their crossover game again, but lost a lead twice to go into regulation time. to finish 3-3.
“We may need to do something else. After that, we’ll work on how to get a mental coach involved. I think that’s an important part for the future of the team,” a distraught Reid said at the post-game conference.
“In terms of the drills or practices, we do what all the other teams do. I’ve been in this game for a long time and I know what other teams do. If anything is needed, a silver bullet out there, I think (is) mental .” In the shootout, India and New Zealand were tied 3–3 after five shots. Captain Harmanpreet Singh had a chance to seal the game in the first round of sudden death when New Zealander Nic Woods blew his chance but he inexplicably chose to take a direct hit from range and squandered the golden opportunity .
Then, both Raj Kumar Pal and Sean Findlay scored as the scores were tied.
Both Sukhjeet and Hayden Phillips then missed to maintain the deficit. Shamsher Singh ultimately missed as Sam Lane converted to seal a 5-4 shootout win for New Zealand and break the hearts of the 15,000 packed crowd at Kalinga Stadium.
When asked why he shot like that at a crucial moment, Harmanpreet said: “It was a good chance and I wanted to score and seal the game. But it didn’t happen.” On whether captaincy has put pressure on him and influenced his performance, he said: “It’s a team game. Everyone has been talking about my (lack of) penalty corners. But I wouldn’t have gone into a game without wanting to score. don’t feel any pressure. I have to work harder and so does the team.” Reid said the team needs to go back to the drawing board and fix the mistakes.
“Tonight we lacked consistency. For example, in the last fifteen minutes we let ourselves down. We threw the ball away, kept doing things like that. Things like that made it very difficult for ourselves.
“Each team has had certain issues at some point, like converting circle penetration. We have to go back to the drawing board later,” he said.
“It’s very hard to answer questions after a loss like that. It’s (lack of) skill execution at the end of the day, we need to work on that.” He declined to comment on whether the current team was the best available for the World Cup.
“I am not making any statements about the players. We have to play two more matches (ranking matches for places 9 to 16).” “We made a lot of circle penetration, but we couldn’t convert them. Three or four (goals) more could have been there.” The Australian said failure to use penalty corners was not the only problem against New Zealand.
“PC was a factor but not the only one. The problem tonight was that every time we won the ball we gave it back (to the opponents) and that happened many times. That was the telling factor and you can’t do that now .” level.” Reid, whose tenure runs until the 2024 Olympics, gave no hint of quitting the job as he listed the upcoming games.
“After these two ranking games, we have Pro League games against Germany and Australia and then we have a Test series against Australia. But our focus is on the next game.” India will play against Japan in the classification match on January 26.
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