Five players of the Indian hockey team have given the national camp a miss, allegedly due to a rift with the chief coach Jose Manuel Brasa.
Five players of the Indian hockey team have given the national camp a miss, allegedly due to a rift with the chief coach Jose Manuel Brasa.
Prabodh Tirkey, Ignace Tirkey, Hari Prasad, Ravi Pal Singh and VS Vinay have not attended the national camp, which has been going on at the Balewadi Sports Complex in Pune since November 4.
None of these players have been included in the Champions Challenge squad, despite all of them featuring in the four-nation European tour in July. They did not make the cut for the squad for the Test series against Canada, where Brasa said he was ‘forced to make six experimental changes’ to the squad that went for the European tour. Vinay, however, was named as one of the five standbys for Canada.
It is believed that there is a growing discontent within the team over the coaching method adopted by Brasa. “We are being taught how to hold a hockey stick. We are taught how to pass the ball, how to hit it…he may be from Spain, who are champions in hockey, but we are not that bad,” fumes one of the discards.
It is learnt through reliable sources that even Sandeep Singh had a major tiff with Brasa a week and a half ago. “Sandeep could not understand why he was being taught how to hold a stick after playing for so many years. He countered Brasa and a major argument started. Arjun Halappa had to intervene to calm things down,” the source said.
“Brasa has a dictator style of functioning. The team trains for nearly 12 hours everyday. Today (Monday) we had our first day off since coming here on November 4. Where is the recovery period? Players are bound to be fatigued or be injured.”
Incidentally, Sandeep — who Brasa feels is one of the best in the world — was sacked as the captain just a few days after the tiff.
However, in the letter to the coach and Hockey India all the players have cited ‘personal commitments’ as the reason to skip the camp. “We will speak to Hockey India officials. But is there a point of telling them anything? They themselves are in such a mess,” the
player said.
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