Focus on 2020 Olympics: Ballal

While lauding the gold medal triumph of the Indian men's hockey team at the Asian Games in Incheon Friday, former international goalkeeper Ashish Ballal, felt that the authorities should now focus attention on building on the latest success for the 2020 Olympics.

"It was a great win no doubt, but I feel the hard work has just begun. We should now start planning not for the 2016 Olympics but the 2020 Games," Ballal told IANS reacting to India's win against Pakistan in the Asian Games hockey final at Incheon Friday.

"I was quite confident that Sreejesh will make some saves in the tie-breaker and watching the final, flooded me with memories of 1998 Asian Games final," said Ballal hero of India's previous Asian Games gold medal triumph in Bangkok, 16 years ago.

Like Sreejesh in Incheon, Ballal also came up with two great saves in the tie-breaker against South Korea to help India clinch the gold medal after the teams were tied 1-1 at the end of extra-time.

The victory notwithstanding, Ballal felt that there were still many rough edges in the Indian team that needed to be ironed out while the overall standard was still way off the mark compared to Europe and Australia.

"I could still spot many shortcomings in the team's performance and some of the mistakes were elementary. Of course, you can't take anything from the gold medal triumph, but our efforts should now be to develop the sport at the grass-root levels, keeping in mind the 2020 Olympics.

"Compared to the standard of hockey in Europe, it is like chalk and cheese. I feel we still have a long way to go. However, the victory came not a moment soon as a defeat would have been end of the road for Indian hockey.

"In the recent past, there has been a lot of in-fighting with two National federations and what not. Our last place finish in 2012 Olympics and ninth in the recent World Cup led to a lot of pessimism, but the win in Incheon gives us a hope that we are still there," said Ballal speaking to IANS here Friday.

On the team's overall performance at Incheon, Ballal pointed out that much work needed to be done to strengthen the frontline and deep defence.

"In the first place, we took a big risk in taking only one World class goalkeeper in Sreejesh. In the long term, it will not help as players will tend to take their places for granted without competition.

"Our drag-flicks at penalty corners was dismal in terms of conversion percentage. Our forwards continued to miss scoring chances. As such, there was no standout performance," Ballal opined.