LAHORE: The Pakistan Hockey Federation is considering hiring a foreign coach for the junior hockey team to bring maturity in the play of young players at the beginning of their international hockey careers.
“We are seriously considering getting the services of a suitable foreign hockey expert on the same pattern of our senior team because attaching a foreign coach with our senior team has yielded productive results,” said PHF Secretary Mohammad Asif Bajwa while talking to APP on Wednesday.
He said the junior team despite doing so well in its initial matches of the U-18 Asia Cup could not cope with the fast running South Korean team in the semi finals and failed to handle the situation in a professional manner.
“At that stage we felt that a foreign qualified professional coach could have handled the situation in a better match strategy helping the players to come out of the pressure.
“The junior team is full of potential and players have the necessary talent to excel at the highest level of the game and they did everything in the match except scoring which was evident that they missed dozens of chances and as soon as the Korean side scored two goals they could not lift the level of their game and remained under pressure which was an alarming sign,” he asserted.
He said the experiment to have a Dutch coach with the senior team proved to be a success as the team was producing good results and its performance graph was going up with each passing day.
“In today's modern hockey, coaching has become a tough job. It has become a complete science and unfortunately our coaches are far behind because of lesser education and less participation in high profile international coaching courses,” he said.
Bajwa rejected the impression that in the wake of junior team's not winning the Junior Asia Cup; the PHF was considering changes in team management.
“Rather we will like to add a foreign coach or to depute a more specialised coach as the team management has been given the mandate until the 2012 junior world cup qualifying round,” said the PHF official.
He said he was not disappointed with the showing of the team in the junior Asia Cup because it was not fair to take the credit away from players because of one bad performance in the entire tournament.
“It is the right time to look into the aspects which let the team down against Korea and to take remedial measures as we are targeting to qualify for the Junior World Cup in 2013,” said the PHF Secretary.
Bajwa said the PHF did not believe in implementing short term measures for lifting the sagging fortunes of the game and it had undertaken long term game development plan to address problems at junior level of hockey to ensure a better future of the game.