Indian hockey team might have failed to reach the semi final of the 8th Asia Cup Hockey tournament, but the men in blue could finish the tournament fifth after defeating Japan 5-1 convincingly today. India earlier defeated Bangladesh 11-1 in the 6th/7th place deciding match, and thus, qualified for the 5th place deciding match against Japan.
India got off to a good start in the match with Rajpal Singh scoring in the very first minute of the match, before Captain Sandeep Singh scoring the second goal in the 21st minute. However, Japan decreased India’s lead thanks to a field goal from Hiroki Sakamoto in the 32nd minute. India was leading 2-1 in the first half. To be honest, neither side performed accordingly, but India played better than Japan.
However, the match was not entertaining anyway. Tushar Khandker increased the lead to 3-1 for India in the 64th minute, just 3 minutes before Prabhjot Singh scoring the fourth goal of India. Khandker then scored another goal to make it 5-1.
Well, you might think that it was a good performance by Indian team. However, India did not have as much dominance over Japan as the score line might suggest. Still, it was better off to finish at the 5th place in the tournament. However, I do not see any scope to become happy with the performance of India’s performance. In fact, this has been first time, Indian team failed to reach the semi final of Asia Cup Hockey. They lost to Pakistan in the first match, and most surprisingly India was held to a 2-2 draw by China. In both the games, India conceded late goals to destroy their party and this has been a long-standing problem for the Indian team.
Indian team now has new coach and I think, it would be a challenge for the new coach to solve this problem ahead of next year’s Hockey World Cup 2009 which is all set to take place in India.
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