Personally, I’m devastated. I’ve not played in the Olympics and was looking forward to going to Beijing. India has never missed an Olympic berth.
Indian hockey captain Prabodh Tirkey speaks his heart out to Vijay Tagore
Personally, I’m devastated. I’ve not played in the Olympics and was looking forward to going to Beijing. India has never missed an Olympic berth. That it happened in my captaincy is something I cannot digest. I’m heartbroken. We’ve got many calls after our defeat. The IHF has told us to forget it but I think nothing can console me.
I still cannot believe that we’ve lost the final. We’ve an excellent team and our preparation was very good. The players are also very talented. I did not have any problems with any player. When I was the captain of the junior team, I had a few problems but with the senior team I did not face any such problem. There was good unity among the players. It was all because we messed up in the final. We’re playing well for one year but when it came to the crunch, we failed to cope up with the pressure. In one year we had one bad day. That was on the wrong day. We flopped miserably.
I’m not trying to give excuses but we got yellow cards at the wrong time. Playing with 10 players at international level is not easy. We had to play with 10 players for 25 minutes. The tournament officials had also demoralised us the previous night by warning us about the cards. Such warnings came at a wrong time.
The officials had knocked the door at midnight. I think the coach should not be blamed for the defeat. He is a superb coach and all the members of the team think he has changed the way hockey has to be played. He has tremendous knowledge of the game and has done a wonderful job. It is up the IHF to decide on the coach but I think Carvalho has done well and there is no need for a foreign coach.
The preparation was very good. We planned properly and were confident of doing well. But in the end one bad day spoiled our one year’s good work.
We need to improve on short corner conversion. We need to do well upfront. We need to score more goals. We’re very good in deep defense. Unfortunately, no one clicked that day.
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