A lackluster India suffered their second consecutive defeat to crash out of the title race of Sultan Azlan Shah Cup hockey tournament and chief coach Paul Van Ass expressed his unhappiness over the performance of his players, saying that for the second day on the trot they gave away the match to the opposition.
Missed chances and sloppy defending continued to haunt India in the tournament as they yet again conceded a late goal to lose 2-3 to lower-ranked Malaysia at the Azlan Shah Stadium.
"No, I am not happy with the performance. I am especially not happy with the way we started," Van Ass replied when asked about the performance of his players.
"I was happy with the performance against Korea. That was a matured game. I was relatively happy with the performance against New Zealand. We gave away that game in the end. But today we gave it away again. That's the story which we have to solve," a visibly disappointed Van Ass said.
"Our performance in the first two quarters was very poor. Our scoring rate is very low. We had a lot of field chances today. Against New Zealand as well there were a lot of chances. If you put them in the problem is solved but there is something wrong which we have to analyse and solve," he added.
Faizaal Saari (17th minute), Haziq Samsul (35th) and Shahrun Abdullah (58th) scored the goals to hand Malaysia their first win in the tournament after two consecutive defeats.
For India Rupinder Pal Singh (20th, 51st) converted two penalty corners but it was not enough to give Van Ass his first taste of victory.
"Towards the end we pushed for the third goal. The mindset was to try and score the third goal. But there we lost little bit of control and this can happens which is not good," Van Ass said about the goal which India conceded two minutes from the final hooter.
With just one point from three games, India are out of the race for Sunday's final.
India next play lowly Canada before facing world champions Australia on Saturday, while Malaysia will be up against Korea.
Van Ass said from here every match is important for him to build the team for next year's Olympics but warned Indian fans to keep realistic expectation in Rio.
"Everyone in India is expecting a medal from us in Rio. We are number nine in the world and you can see the reason why we are number nine in the world. My personal plan is to have a good camp in the summer time where we can work on several aspects.
"Then we have Hockey World League 3 where we should pick up some good results. For me the real test will be the Hockey World League Final in December where we will compete against the best eight of the world. That will give us a measurement as whether we have real chance in Rio," the Dutchman said.
"Everybody expect us to beat Canada (tomorrow) but I am not convinced. We have to take it from where we left it. Every game is important because every game gives me information to work on the areas and at the moment that is far more important than the result," Van Ass added.
