Asian Games, Commonwealth are among next milestones, says Indian hockey coach Graham Reid

Kolkata: Graham Reid, the inspirational coach India’s bronze medallist hockey team in Tokyo Olympics, is a believer in ‘‘next thing mentality,’’ in his own words. While the euphoria over the team ending a 41-year-old medal drought still continues, the Australian is already working out on the new milestones over the next few years.

“We have set some milestones in terms of the competitions that are coming up for us now. We have the Asian Games, FIH Pro League, Commonwealth Games, then World Cup in the beginning of 2023 and then the Paris Olympics the following year. So the milestones have been set, but how we need to prepare between those milestones will be decided in the next month or so,’’ said Reid, a silver medallist as a player for Australia in the 1992 Barcelona Olympics.

‘‘We also have to sit down and analyse all the games from the Olympics and see what the other teams have been doing, because you never get the time to do that in the middle of a tournament, when the focus is limited only on the next opponent. We also need to get feedback from our players on what they feel are the skills that they need to work on going forward and surely we need to accelerate our learning to be consistently up there with the best teams in the world all the time,” the hard taskmaster said in a podcast series initiated by Hockey India.

Reflecting on the team’s run-up to the Olympics, which was badly affected due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Reid felt that the long stretch of time that the team spent together in SAI Bengaluru help them bond better and shaped their character as a group.

“I kept saying to the team that the adversity and the resilience that they have shared together will come to the fore and unite them when the chips are down. You just have to look at the bronze medal match and see that when we were 1-3 down, it would have been very easy to give up and admit that it’s not our day, but we didn’t do that. We pulled ourselves together and displayed a magnificent example of fighting back and taking the next step from that position one at a time,” said Reid.

How difficult was it to pull the team together after the 7-1 setback against Australia in the very second league game? Reid gave an insight about how he tried to spur the team on: “Since day one, I have tried to instil a next thing mentality in the team. After facing a disappointing result, you cannot get caught up thinking about what you could have done. The next thing that you need to do is the most important.

‘‘Like I say, you can change the future, but you cannot change the past. So after the disappointing result against Australia, we drew a line in the sand before getting to the Olympic village and decided not to ponder on the result any longer. We focussed on the things we needed to improve from our end, and thankfully the group reacted very well to that approach as well. Our full focus was on putting together a good run of results from that point on, and that’s exactly what we managed to do,” he added.