Asian Champions Trophy Hockey 2023: Acid test for India ahead of Asian Games Premium

Top-flight international hockey will return to Chennai after 15 years when the city hosts the Asian Champions Trophy from August 3-12. It will feature the continent’s top six teams, including Pakistan.

Great expectations: India is joint top of the winners’ table with Pakistan with three titles each. | Photo Credit: Hockey India

Craig Fulton has already experienced a lot since the beginning of the year: a heartbreaking World Cup final defeat with Belgium, the intensity and passion of Indian fans as a neutral, a completely different culture with his appointment as India’s chief coach, and some tough outings in the FIH Pro League as he comes to terms with the resources and personnel at his disposal in a country that continues to follow a simple script vis-à-vis sports: titles equal talent.

But while Fulton was an outsider to the Odisha crowd then, the South African will now be in the hot seat for the first time when the Indian men’s team steps out for the Asian Champions Trophy (ACT) in Chennai in August, facing his toughest outing yet: coaching the Indian team in a major tournament at home, in a city that has been starved of hockey action for close to two decades but historically boasts of both great practitioners of the game and its most ardent supporters.

Despite the immense pressure, Fulton is trying to keep the focus firmly within, working on the team, sticking to a process, and not thinking too much about the opposition. “I think other teams have also won it, and they have all become a threat, and you don’t know what teams come up with in a one-off game. That’s the beauty of our sport—any team can do anything on any day. But I am not worried about any specific team; it’s always about a collective focus on all the teams we will be playing against, especially in the crossovers,” Fulton explained.

“We want to make sure we are well prepared for any situation, and we are covering all that as we go. We are talking about it, discussing openly what our potential challenges are and how we can overcome them. At the end of the day our focus is on us and our process — that’s 80 per cent of what we are doing — and 20 per cent on the opposition; make no mistake, they will be prepared,” he added.

With the competition sandwiched between the present and future — a tough Europe tour at the end of July and the all-important Asian Games in September with a ticket to the Paris Olympics as the top prize — there are no doubts where the ACT lies in the scheme of things. “All the top Asian sides will be participating in the Asian Champions Trophy, and it will be very important for all the teams; they will get a great tournament before the Asian Games. I expect all the teams to come at full strength. But even if they decide to experiment, there is no doubt that it is a big competition for everyone,” Hockey India president Dilip Tirkey insisted.

Big test: Craig Fulton (left) will be facing his toughest outing yet. | Photo Credit: Hockey India

Performing well at the ACT will be a big boost; besides India, there will be Korea, China, Japan, Malaysia, and Pakistan in action through the 10-day competition. With the same teams vying for the title in Hangzhou, it will be a precursor to what might be in store. It won’t be a definite sign of any team’s absolute dominance, though, given the trajectory of teams at the competition and over the years — even though, as host and the highest-ranked Asian side in the world, India will be the overwhelming favourite for the top spot.

Jointly top of the winners’ table with Pakistan with three titles each, this is the first time India will be hosting the tournament, which was envisaged and first held in 2011 on a trial basis to provide more competition to Asian teams and raise the overall level of the sport in the continent. Indian hockey has changed so much since then that the originators of the idea would be impressed.

Winning the inaugural edition was a big shot in the arm, coming as it did after a two-year title drought. That was a raw team, youngsters void of fear, that pulled off the winner in a dramatic shootout with Pakistan, turning Yuvraj Walmiki into an overnight star and kickstarting the era of PR Sreejesh’s prominence under the bar, a spot he is yet to relinquish. The title also came on the back of acrimonious and disciplinary off-field issues that saw Sandeep Singh and Sardar Singh quit the camp midway and team changes at the last minute. Hockey India was barely a year old, the winning team received a laughable Rs. 25,000 prize money, and the sport was replete with administrative uncertainties.

A year later, India finished last at the 2012 London Olympics, again marred allegedly by groups in the squad, infighting and ego issues, and an inability by coach Michael Nobbs to handle the players or the pressure of expectations. He still managed to hang on for another year before being unceremoniously dumped.

Pakistan, meanwhile, won the next two ACT editions — in 2012 and 2013 — but that did nothing to stem its downward spiral, failing to qualify for the next two Olympics and the 2014 World Cup. By the time the two teams agreed to hold the trophy aloft together in 2018 after a rain-abandoned final, things had gone very differently for the two neighbours. The title drought continued, but the financial and administrative clout of Hockey India, aided by financial gains from the Hockey India League, and a semblance of modernity in the hirings, meant Indian hockey managed to regularly attract the best in the business, which eventually led to bronze at the Tokyo Olympics. Among others, Malaysia has been a consistent number three — five times out of six — while Korea, Japan, and China have been occasionally impressive but unable to break the Indo-Pak stranglehold.

Focus on the field: All preparations aside, the biggest spotlight will be on the players themselves. | Photo Credit: PTI

“For Indian fans, all tournaments are important; they want to win every time. But this event, especially at this time, is very important for us. The coach has a certain way he wants to work and build the team, and this will be a very important test of that. A coach always brings his thoughts and planning as he understands the way forward for the future, but he also has to adapt to the Indian thought process and expectations,” Tirkey said.

Something Fulton has already understood and begun working on, starting with bringing in Paddy Upton (facing page, bottom) as the mental conditioner. He is counting on his fellow South African’s long experience with Indian sports to provide the much-needed mental edge for the hockey team. “I think it’s quite plain to see in high-performance sports that those with the mental edge are normally the most consistent, and if you are consistently doing things better than the opposition, you normally win more than you lose. That’s where I see a gap and where we can do some good work. The diversity in the team and India as a whole is huge — players from different areas, different cultures, speaking different languages — we are trying to connect the dots,” the coach admitted, but warned that it was not an overnight process.

But all preparations aside, the biggest spotlight will be on the players themselves. The Olympic bronze, already two years in the past, continues to be brought up in every conversation, making it difficult for both the fans and the players to move on.

A disappointing World Cup raised some concerns, but the following successes in the Pro League eased them — or at least overlooked them for now. Many from that inaugural win 12 years ago have now added ‘former international’ to their names, while two of the newest — Sreejesh and Manpreet Singh, also the youngest on that side — now form the core. The disappointment of bronze in the 2021 edition, soon after the high of Tokyo, and the underwhelming 2018 Asiad will not be easy to forget.

“There will be pressure — of performance here, at home, in a venue that is seeing hockey return after almost two decades and hopefully heightened expectations. There will also be pressure to do well against teams India will again face after a month in a competition with much more at stake. And although it doesn’t relate to the ACT directly, there will also be somewhere in the back of their minds the fact that winning the Asian Games against these same teams will help avoid the potentially tricky situation of travelling to Lahore for Olympic qualifiers. But I feel this team is now used to the pressure, and they have proven they can handle it,” hoped an optimistic Jagbir Singh, a former India international.

For Fulton, however, the targets are clear. “By the time the ACT ends, we will have gathered a lot of information about our team from the tournament and the Spanish tour, the selected players, and our best combinations.

“For me, it’s more about India being able to play to its strengths and make a difference in the areas where we have lacked previously. The last time we won the Asian Games was in 2014, so yeah, it’s been a while, and it will be good to get it,” he signed off.