Hockey India announced a 39-member group of core probables for the Senior Men’s National Coaching camp scheduled from the latter half of this month till July 19 at the Sports Authority of India Centre in Bengaluru.
The national camp will be to fine-tune the player ahead of their travel to Terrassa in Spain where the Team will compete against England, Spain and the Netherlands in a tournament which is organized to honour the 100th anniversary of the Spanish Hockey Federation. The tournament will start on July 25 and will run till July 30. It will be a perfect preparation for the Indian team for the prestigious Asian Champions Trophy in Chennai which will be starting on August 3. The Asian Champions Trophy will see the Indian team face teams like Korea, Malaysia, Pakistan, Japan and China.
The core group has a wide array of players in every position. The goalkeepers in the 39-member list include PR Sreejesh, Kishan Bahadur Pathak, Suraj Karkera, Pawan Malik, and Prashant Kumar Chauhan. Among defenders, Harmanpreet Singh leads the pack along with others like Jarmanpreet Singh, Surender Kumar, Varun Kumar, Amit Rohidas, Gurinder Singh, Jugraj Singh, Mandeep Mor, Nilam Sanjeep Xess, Sanjay, Yashdeep Siwach, Dipsan Tirkey, and Manjeet.
The midfielders called up to the camp are Manpreet Singh, Hardik Singh, Vivek Sagar Prasad, Moirangthem Rabichandra Singh, Shamsher Singh, Nilakanta Sharma, Rajkumar Pal, Sumit, Akashdeep Singh, Gurjant Singh, Mohd. Raheel Mouseen, and Maninder Singh. The list also includes some exceptional forwards such as Selvam Karthi, Mandeep Singh, Lalit Kumar Upadhyay, Abhishek, Dilpreet Singh, Sukhjeet Singh, Simranjeet Singh, Shilanand Lakra, and Pawan Rajbhar.
Speaking at the National Coaching Camp, the Indian Men’s Team head coach Craig Fulton highlighted the positives by stating the team’s good performance in the FIH Hockey Pro League matches in Belgium and the Netherlands. Therefore they are looking to strike that consistency and improve on the areas where they are lacking. He feels it is a testing period for the players ahead of the tournaments.
“We performed well in the FIH Men’s Hockey Pro League 2022/2023 matches in Belgium and the Netherlands, and now we hope to maintain some consistency, especially with important tournaments set to take place later this year. The camp will be an opportunity for us to improve ourselves in certain areas and to work together as a unit once again. With the Hero Asian Champions Trophy Chennai 2023 set to take place in August, followed by the Asian Games 2023 in Hangzhou, China, it is an important camp for us to begin our preparations for the upcoming months and to display the kind of hockey we wish to play,” Fulton highlighted.
