Australian coach slams early morning starts

Sydney: Australia's men's hockey coach Ric Charlesworth has slammed the London Olympic schedule for lumbering his team with three early starts in their round-robin matches at the Games.

The team, dubbed as Kookaburras, are favourites to win the gold but Charlesworth said the schedule, released on Tuesday, was unfair and would be disruptive to his top-seeded team.

"I don't expect special treatment, I expect not to be disadvantaged, out of five matches you may expect one [early] start for our athletes not three," Charlesworth told Hockey Australia's website.

"It interferes with momentum, as major finals won't be played at that hour and it interrupts our routine over two weeks. Early games should be fairly distributed between all teams."

While Australia face Spain, Argentina and Pakistan in matches starting at 8.30am local time, second seeds and defending champions Germany play all their games later in the day.

Not equal

Charlesworth, who led the Australian women's team to gold at the Atlanta and Sydney Olympics before taking over as coach of the Kookaburras in 2009, also pointed to the fact that the top seeds in the women's tournament, the Dutch, had no 8.30am starts.

"It's not that they are No. 1, again it's just that it's not equally shared when some teams have to play three early matches and others none," he said.