NEW DELHI, July 6: India's baffling preparations for Olympic field hockey took another twist on Tuesday when two assistant coaches were sacked barely five weeks before the start of the Athens Games.

Harendra Singh and Ranjan Negi were shown the door after the team's poor display in a four-nation tournament in the Netherlands last week and replaced by former international Jagbir Singh and Dutchman Frank Leictre.

The duo will join the squad's support staff headed by chief coach Rajinder Singh and two German experts, Oliver Kurtz and Gerhard Rach, in a bid to put the floundering campaign of the eight-time champions back on track.

Jagbir played international hockey as a striker between 1988 and 1992, while Leictre is a former Olympian and coach of the Dutch junior team. India lost all four matches at Amsterdam, including embarrassing 6-1 and 5-3 defeats against arch-rivals Pakistan.

Other teams in the fray were Olympic champions the Netherlands and Germany. Indian Hockey Federation (IHF) president Kunwar Gill stunned reporters at a media conference here by saying he was not surprised at what happened in Amsterdam.

"I was not surprised by the result, for I did not expect the team to do any better," Gill said. "Our goal keeping and penalty corner conversions let us down. We will try to improve that but I can say the morale of the team is quite high."

The IHF has been slammed in the media for constantly changing and chopping players over the past year, which has given the squad an unsettled look. Veteran striker Dhanraj Pillay was initially dropped from the squad, but the IHF changed its mind when former players led protest marches through the streets of New Delhi in June to press for his inclusion.

Pillay's chances of playing in his fourth Olympics will be known when the final 18-man squad is short-listed after another tournament in Germany later this month. Compounding the IHF's problems were media reports that both the German coaches, who were appointed in May, had an unsavoury past.

Kurtz, part of Germany's gold medal-winning team at the Barcelona Olympics in 1992, was suspended from international hockey from October 1995 to August 1997 after testing positive for cocaine.

Rach allegedly faced 30 criminal charges of subsidy fraud, forgery and tax evasion in 2000 and was sent to prison for eight months. Gill, however, played down the controversy and said both coaches would be retained on a long-term basis.

"It is irrelevant now whether we knew about their past," the IHF president said. "But we are retaining them. In fact, the two will be coming to India after the Olympics to hold a special camp for coaches."

India, who won seven Olympic golds between 1928 and 1964, have fallen badly since adding an eighth gold at the Moscow Games in 1980 which did not feature hockey powerhouses like Australia, Germany and Pakistan due to the US-led boycott.

They finished seventh at Sydney in 2000. India have been drawn in Pool 'B' of the 12-nation event at Athens alongside defending champions the Netherlands, Australia, Argentina, New Zealand and South Africa. Pool 'A' comprises Pakistan, Germany, South Korea, Great Britain, Spain and Egypt. The top two teams from each pool will qualify for the semifinals. -AFP