New Delhi, Nov 9 (IANS) Indian women’s hockey team coach Maharaj Krishan Kaushik is delighted that his side is making it to next year’s World Cup in Argentina, but hastened to add that the girls need to fine-tune their game to be a consistent world-class team.
To be a top international outfit, Kaushik says, the girls will have to bring in more variation into their play.

“The game has to be more open and the girls must have better percentage of penalty-corner conversion and for that they need to have variation in their attempts,” Kaushik told IANS on the team’s return from Bangkok Monday after losing the Asia Cup final to China 3-5.

The team, led by Surinder Kaur, did well to take early lead and also fight back and score two goals in the second half after conceding three goals in the first.

Kaushik says he is “satisfied” to the extent that the team has qualified for the World Cup as that was the prime target before the team left for the Thai capital.

“Qualifying for the World Cup was one of our targets in the tournament and we are happy to achieve that. The team can draw lot of positives from the tournament.”

Surinder sees the victory over a strong Korean team in the semi-final as the high spot of their Asia Cup campaign because a loss there would have forced the Indians to go through a cumbersome, unpredictable qualifying process.

“We beat Korea in the Asian Games and then we lost in the next meeting. The girls were determined this time to beat them,” she said.

“The team has shown much improvement in the last two tournaments. We have worked a lot on the physical aspect of our game. We now need to focus on getting our act together in penalty corners, defence etc.”