August 23, 2008	Saturday	Sha'aban 20, 1429

BEIJING, Aug 22: Former Pakistan Captain and star forward Rehan Butt said on Friday that he is undecided about his hockey future despite his team’s worst-ever show in the Beijing Olympics 2008.

“We have just finished our outing in the Beijing Olympics and I have no immediate plans to retire from the game,” he told APP on Friday. “After we go back home, we will talk to Pakistan Hockey Federation (PHF) officials to decide who will retire and who will continue playing for Pakistan,” he said.

“We will now rebuild a new team and there will be lot of changes soon. We have high hopes from our younger generation of players such as Abbas Haider, Muhammad Zubair and Shafqat Rasool who are all quite good,” he commented.

The 31-year-old Lahore-born Rehan is just one match away from completing 250 international matches for Pakistan since making his debut in 2003. He is featuring in his second Olympics after having led the team in 2004 Athens Games.

“We talked a lot about winning and reaching the semi-final before coming to Beijing Olympics but it went horribly wrong,” he admitted. “We had really worked hard in the camp at home to prepare for the Olympics and were quite confident and motivated when we arrived in Beijing,” he said. “However, losing the opener against Great Britain was such a shock that we never recovered from it.”

“We didn’t play badly against Australia or against the Netherlandsand and you can judge that by the margin of defeats,” argued Rehan. “We tried our best but unfortunately we couldn’t achieve the desired results.”

Rehan criticised the International Hockey Federation (FIH) for changing the rule of playing straight with the fourth team of the other pool in the classifications matches instead of criss-cross schedule like it used to be before.

Commenting on the poor penalty corner conversion rate in Beijing Games, Rehan said: “Penalty corner conversion is a big problem for us. If our penalty corner specialist Imran Warsi had scored regularly, things would have been have been better for us. But we needed more training on that which we could not do earlier,” he said.—APP