Muhammad Imran doesn’t consider a lack of international competition recently to be any barrier to his Pakistan field hockey team’s Asian Games title defense.
“We’ve trained with the aim of winning the gold medal again,” the 34-year-old Pakistan captain told the media today.
“We may not have played enough against other teams this year, but we’ve made up by playing a lot of practice matches.“
Pakistan failed to qualify for this year’s World Cup in the Netherlands, and did not field a team at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow due to a split in its national Olympic association.
“Each team knows the pattern of other teams and the way they attack or defend. But we might just have an advantage over others because they may not have seen us enough,” he said.
“On the other hand, we’ve studied South Korea and India’s matches at the World Cup and the Commonwealth Games.“ said the captain.
Imran, one of 10 players here from the squad which won at Guangzhou four years ago, said it was important for his team to adjust to the new game format in which four 15-minute quarters replaces the previous format of two 35-minute halves.
“The game is becoming faster and coaches have to change their plans every 15 minutes. India might have a slight advantage over us in this regard as they’ve played in the format in their (Hockey India) league,” he said.
Pakistan has won eight gold medals, two silver and three bronze in 16 editions of the Asian Games, finishing outside the medals bracket only at the Busan Asian Games in 2002.
