Senior players in Indian hockey team unhappy with coach Sjoerd Marijne
Senior hockey players of the Indian hockey are planning to meet up with coach Sjoerd Marijne in order to make known their displeasure over the Dutchās selection policy when it came to picking the starting XI. Earlier, Marijne had called his CWG squad 'unstoppable' before departing for Gold Coast.
The Indian menās hockey team suffered a disappointing loss in the semi-final of the recently concluded 2018 Gold Coast Commonwealth games where they succumbed to a 3-2 loss to a ranked below them in the form of New Zealand. They followed up that loss with another narrow defeat in the bronze medal play-off match where they fell to a 2-1 defeat against England.
This summed up a disappointing outing for the Indian hockey team that traveled to Gold Coast and returned home without a medal in hockey for the first time since 2006. A lot of questions were raised over Dutch coach Sjoerd Marijneās selection policy where he focused on introducing youngsters into the setup despite their lack of experience on the big stage.
According to a report by Zee news, a few of the senior Indian players were unhappy with Marijneās selection policy and have arranged a meeting with the coach in order to sort things out.
"Some of the senior players in the team have had a meeting with Sjoerd and said that they should not overly focus on blooding in youngsters in place of experience, which will only put the team under pressure.
"The level of Test matches and CWG isn't the same. It's unjustified to compare a Test-match pressure to that of a world-level tournament. You need experienced heads and legs on the pitch in crunch knockout games. Dilpreet, Vivek, Sumit,Ā and Gurinder (Singh) caved into that must-win pressure," a source told Zee news.
Previously, Marijne claimed that the squad members who made the trip to Gold Coast were literally āunstoppableā and
"Look at Australia. They fielded almost the same team for both Sultan Azlan Shah (Cup) and CWG. And what we did? Sent a depleted team led by Sardar to Malaysia and then shuffled the pack inserting a few fresh cards in it. Whether we took out the aces in doing so is for everyone to decide. But Australia won both the tournaments and we finished fifth at Azlan Shah and fourth in Gold Coast.Ā
"That tells you playing together over a period of time matters when it comes to coordination. Chopping and changing at the doorstep of a major tournament is recipe for disaster," the source said.
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