Junior Women’s Hockey World Cup: Of colour-coded training and a delay that helped Indian team

CHENNAI: On the eve of the Junior World Cup in Potchefstroom in early December, Khushboo was all set and ready. She had packed her kit, counted her bags and checked her passport multiple times. She was hopeful that the tournament would be her pathway to senior time.

Of course, Khushboo wasn’t the only player harbouring such dreams. The team scheduled to fly out to South Africa had a lot of rookies in terms of having zero senior international experience. Apart from Khushboo, fellow keeper, Bichu Devi, vice-captain, Ishika Chaudhary, Akshata Dhekale, Marina, Preeti, Priyanka, Ajmina Kujur, Baljeet Kaur, Reet, Vaishnavi Phalke, Beauty Dungdung, Deepika, Mumtaz Khan, Sangita Kumari and Jiwan Toppo were in the same boat.

Omicron temporarily put a stop to their best-laid plans. While the three Olympians in the original touring party — Salima Tete, Lalremsiami and Sharmila Devi — had already experienced this when the Tokyo Games was pushed back, the others were feeling this for the first time.

In hindsight, the postponement of the junior World Cup has worked out well for them. Out of the 15, Bichu, Chaudhary, Dhekale, Deepika and Sangita made their debuts for the senior team at the Asia Cup or in the subsequent Pro League games.

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Put it this way. Out of the 20 that have travelled to South Africa, 40 per cent of the players have senior international caps (it was 15 per cent originally). The nervousness, fear factor or going into the unknown, call it what you want, wasn’t there when the team flew to South Africa in late March.

Chaudhary pretty much admitted this before the women’s quarterfinal against South Korea. “I got a chance to perform at the senior level,” she said. “Getting opportunities to play in the Pro League provided us that advantage. Many of our junior team made debuts (for the seniors). The confidence we gained from it is helping us now.”

They will need to carry forward that confidence against the Netherlands in the semifinal on Sunday. For Netherlands, who have three gold, one silver and a bronze, are the high priests of this event.

Another thing that has helped this team reach this stage is the bond and the existing culture within. The players know each other like the back of their own hands. As the juniors and the seniors trained together in Bengaluru and played many practice matches, especially before the Olympics, there is a common theme (playing style, structure and combination) between both camps.

“We tried and tested a lot of combinations in practice matches against the seniors,” Tete said before the quarterfinal. “A lot of players didn’t know how to play in structure, they do now.”

That culture has also fostered a sense of togetherness in the squad. Chaudhary spoke about the fact that a vast majority of the squad has trained under one roof for the last four to five years. Eight of the nine that medalled at the Youth Olympics in Argentina in 2018 will be aiming to become the first women’s team at any level to reach a global FIH final.

“We have been training together from the Youth Olympics,” Chaudhary said. “We know each other a lot. We enjoy a lot, the environment in our batch is very different.”

When they are not enjoying, a rigorous training programme — one of the most complete junior women’s training programme anywhere in the world — ensures that they catch up to the likes of Netherlands in the next few years. For example, their dedicated training programme is split into three categories. Red, Green or Yellow depending on what the coaches at the camp want to focus on that particular day.

Red stands for ‘high-intensity training sessions’. In this session, they tend to play extremely fast-past games over four quarters of 10 minutes each. In a Green session, there is more focused skill work as they split up depending on their specialisation (defenders, goalkeepers, attackers, midfielders). Yellow stands for conditioning.

Ultimately, irrespective of the results, putting in place a proper structure where excellence can be routinely attained is what counts. As far as the junior team is concerned, that is supplying players to the senior squad. This team has already started doing that and may continue doing so, irrespective of what happens on Sunday.