'Next thing mentality' - The secret of Indian men's hockey team success at the Olympics
The Indian men’s hockey team scripted history in the recently concluded Tokyo Olympics 2021. The team won an Olympic medal after a long gap of 41 years.
The Manpreet Singh-led hockey team dished out an all-round performance to beat Germany to win the bronze medal. While the players gave it their all on the turf, one of the chief architects of the successful campaign was head coach Graham Reid.
The Indian men’s hockey team’s head coach is no stranger to success, especially on the Olympic stage. He won a silver medal as a player for Australia in the 1992 Barcelona Olympics.
However, helping the Indian men’s hockey team win an Olympic bronze medal, after a four decade long wait, ranks amongst his most impressive achievements.
Graham Reid gave an insight into the challenges and the process that led to a remarkable feat in an insightful podcast with Hockey India.
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Although the pandemic threw every walk of life out of gear, Graham Reid said the extended period the team spent at the Sports Authority of India (SAI) Center in Bengaluru brought the team closer and shaped their character.
“I kept saying to the team that the adversity and the resilience that they have shared together will come to the fore and unite them when the chips are down. You just have to look at the bronze medal match and see that when we were 1-3 down, it would have been very easy to give up and admit that it’s not our day, but we didn’t do that. We pulled ourselves together and displayed a magnificent example of fighting back and taking the next step from that position one at a time."
Indian men’s hockey team faced challenges and won over them
On the road to winning the bronze medal, the 1-3 deficit in the bronze medal play-off against Germany was not the only challenge that the Indian men’s hockey team had to overcome at the Tokyo Olympics 2021.
The Indian men’s hockey team faced a setback in the second match of the Olympics when they were hammered 1-7 by Australia.
Bouncing back from a demoralizing defeat can be an arduous task. However, Graham Reid strategized and detailed about the process involved in coming back from this defeat. He said:
“Since day one, I have tried to instill a "next thing mentality" in the team. After facing a disappointing result, you cannot get caught up thinking about what you could have done. The next thing that you need to do is the most important. Like I said, you can change the future, but you cannot change the past.
He explained further:
“So, after the disappointing result against Australia, we drew a line in the sand before getting to the Olympic village and decided not to ponder on the result any longer. We focussed on the things we needed to improve from our end, and thankfully the group reacted very well to that approach as well. Our full focus was on putting together a good run of results from that point on, and that’s exactly what we managed to do.”
What next for Indian hockey?
The Tokyo Olympics 2021 has put Indian hockey on a pedestal. Indian hockey teams have set a benchmark at the world level and the team’s future endeavors would be to breach their benchmark more often than not.
Detailing the roadmap ahead and the next steps for Indian hockey, Reid said:
“We have set some milestones in terms of the competitions that are coming up for us now. We have the Asian Games, FIH Pro League, Commonwealth Games, the FIH men’s hockey World Cup in the beginning of 2023, and then the Paris Olympics the following year. So, the milestones have been set, but how we need to prepare between those milestones will be decided in the next month or so.”
He elaborated:
“We also have to sit down and analyze all the games from the Olympics and see what the other teams have been doing, because you never get the time to do that in the middle of a tournament, when the focus is limited only on the next opponent. We also need to get feedback from our players on what they feel are the skills that they need to work on going forward, and surely we need to accelerate our learning to be consistently up there with the best teams in the world all the time.”