NEW DELHI: The Indian women’s hockey team will look to continue the winning momentum when it clashes with a low-ranked Poland in its third match of the London Olympics qualifiers at the Dhyan Chand National Stadium here tomorrow.
After being held to a 1-1 draw by Ukraine in the opening match, India brought their campaign back on track with a 4-1 mauling of Canada yesterday and coach C R Kumar’s wards will look to continue the good work tomorrow.
Ranked 28th in the world, Poland are the lowest-ranked team in the tournament but Kumar doesn’t want to take them lightly.
“These teams are good, ranking may be low but we can’t take them for granted. 28th rank doesn’t mean they are a bad team. We saw their videos against Italy and South Africa and they played well so far, so we can’t take them lightly,” Kumar said.
“We are one goal behind Italy in goal average, so it is important to score more goals but we don’t want to put pressure on players by setting a target, early goals is what we would look for but it is not easy,” he added.
Indian eves played a very aggressive game yesterday and created a lot of scoring opportunities but finishing is still a problem. Their penalty corner conversion rate was better than before as they converted two out of six chances that came their way but it still has to improve if they have to threaten the top-ranked South Africans, who are sitting at the top of the table after wining both their matches convincingly so far.”
“We changed our plan for short corner conversion. Since they tried to block the goal mouth, we changed the tactic of taking a direct shot from the penalty corner and that paid dividends. Our PC conversions have improved but perfection is very important in PC and we have to work really hard in this area,” Kumar added.