Need to control emotions and avoid cards: Graham Reid

Graham Reid, the head coach of the Indian men’s hockey team, which is sweeping the Tokyo Olympics 2020, has warned the team ahead of the semi-final match against Belgium. He has sent out a strong message to the players saying that the team needs to control their emotions and avoid cards in the match.

Reid also highlighted the two green cards and one yellow card the Indian players got during the matches against Australia and Great Britain and said the team should avoid the same thing against a world class team like Belgium.

“I am very proud of the players,” Reid said in a statement. We fought hard and sometimes that’s what you have to do in the final stages of a crucial match like the quarter-finals. We were very lucky yesterday, as Great Britain created more goal opportunities than us, but our penalty corner defence, especially goalkeeper PR Sreejesh, was brilliant and saved us, but we have to look ahead. One of the things we can learn from last night is that there is a difference between passion and emotion. Sometimes we let our emotions take over. We need to keep 11 players on the pitch. The problem is that we played with 10 people for a long time in the match against Great Britain. We can’t do that against Belgium and it’s very difficult if we think we will win by doing this. This will be the big message for the team when we have a meeting today.

The coach said it was great to score a field goal against Great Britain. We didn’t get any corners, so of course we also need to work on consistent attacking pressure, which I always talk about with the players. Like I said, against a team like Belgium it will be very important to have all 11 players on the pitch for the entire duration.

It is noteworthy that India will be on the threshold of creating history by registering a win over Belgium here on Tuesday. Earlier, India tasted success against Belgium in the FIH Hockey Pro League in 2020, where they beat world champions 2-1 in their second match and lost 2-3 in their first two double-headers in Bhubaneswar. Was. Earlier in 2019, India had defeated Belgium 5-1, 2-1 and 2-0 in the warm-up matches.

Meanwhile, Indian men’s hockey team captain Manpreet Singh said, “As far as Belgium is concerned, obviously he and Australia have been sharing the number one spot in the world for the last 18-24 months, so in that sense Belgium is a very Will be a tough opponent, but we have played well with him in the past and have the experience to do well against him, so we need to focus on what we can do against him and make sure we are more disciplined in the defence. and our infrastructure is much better.

Highlighting the team’s spirit of fighting back, the captain said, “If you look back a week at what our group did, I think we have a lot of determination, especially the will to fight in the quarter-finals last night.” appeared. Actually this is the advantage for us. We will need the same fighting spirit against Belgium tomorrow.