Improving defence & finishing skills our focus : Manpreet Singh
India hockey skipper Manpreet Singh said on Saturday that going into the Olympic qualifiers, the focus of the team has been on improving their performance at the two ends of the pitch. "All our recent training sessions have been about improving our defence and finishing," Manpreet told IANS."We have to make sure that whenever we enter the opponent's semi circle we have to be able to get at least a penalty corner or a good shot on target.
India went into that series with hardly any matches against teams of a similar calibre under their belt since they withdrew from the Pro League and Manpreet said that this was a factor in their defeat. "It was our coach's first tour and secondly, we didn't have too much match practice whereas they were playing the Pro League. But even then I would say that the team's performance was good and we took a lot of positives from it," he said. "Whatever we learned from those matches came in handy during the Series Finals in Bhubaneshwar."Manpreet said that he and other senior have a good relationship with Reid and that he has tried to maximise the team's strengths instead of making wholesale changes and imposing a new system. "He is very free with the players. In the training sessions he is very focussed but outside that the players enjoy being around him," he said.India will be travelling to Tokyo to participate in the Olympic test event to be held between August 17 and August 21. They will be facing Australia again there, alongwith New Zealand, Japan and Malaysia. This will be followed by a tour of Belgium from September 23 to October before they play the final round of Olympic Qualifiers which are expected to start at the end of the month.
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