COMMENTBy Tai Beng Hai
(chief coach)
THE long term objective of bridging the gap between Malaysia and the top six or top 10 ranked hokey teams has always been the primary focus of the Malaysian Hockey Federation (MHF).
And obviously, in this Tour of Europe, the key objectives were to play Netherlands and Spain and see where we stand.
Besides exposing our players to the European style and the process of creating depth or a bigger pool of talent in the team, the Olympic Qualifiers is also ingrained in our pro grammes.
And I believe, we manage to achieve these during the Tour.
We (coaches and MHF) have been rebuilding the team since 2009 and there have been improvements. But we can’t just take Malaysia back to the top overnight.
Changing back, and improving our style and concept by playing to our strong points and not going against our culture has definitely benefited us as can be seen from the silver medal at the Asian Games. And to some extent, the final of the 2009 World Cup qualifier in Invercargill, New Zealand.
We are happy that the program has managed to gradually include some young players into the national team and is beginning to show positive results at this early stage.
Leaving behind four main players from the Asian Games was difficult because of various reasons but the need to strive for the long term objectives was the reason.
And for a start,, youngsters Faisal Saari, Marhan Jalil, Azammi Adabi and Azreen Rizal can be considered to have made the grade.
Now the other new batch of four players in the pool of 25, and five players under attachment from the 2013 Project Squad will hopefully see to the long term MHF strategic plan.
The thing we take away the most is the inclusion of younger players from 2013 is their willingness to fight and there is no fear in them to play against world No 3 Netherlands and No 4 Spain.
Muhammad Firhan, Muhammad Azri and Faiz Helmi gave a good show in this Tour. Their physical condition to compete at the senior level is the only setback. But I feel through more exposure and training they will definitely make it to the national team and this is what we are trying to achieve with this batch of players with time fast running out on us.
The MHF Council has given their consensus to the national team program with the inclusion of the attachment program as one of the ways to increase the depth of national team and strengthen the 2013 team indirectly by fast tracking the four players and five attachment players (25 trainees with 4 juniors included and 5 players under attachment to national team), it is a win-win situation for Malaysian hockey in the long run.
We will be approaching the four months timeline in our programme, and the review is up after the Razak Cup.
One of the objectives is to see players playing more competitively to fight for a place in the national team. Some establish players are already stagnant as the window to perform at the highest level is already closing up on them, so the younger talented players must create a healthy com petitive environment by striving to take this opportunity to make the grade.
On the European training Tour we are very satisfied that the general results was good in Spain even though we started poorly against Holland.
This tour was beneficial to expose our players to the European style of playing. We always find it difficult to play them because of their different approach and their long reach. In order to improve at a faster rate we need to play these European teams more often.
We came close in the first match (lost 2-0) and beating the Spanish 3-2 in the second match, it has obviously injected some believe into the players that they can achieve results against the top six in the world.
The primary objective is obviously the Olympic Qualifiers in early 2012 and the next important assignment is the Champions Challenge 1 in South Africa.
Both the tournaments can improve our ranking, and that is what we are working to achieve in the next few months.
