Xtra Time Web Desk: Indian women’s hockey team coach Sjoerd Marijne will be a lot famous man after the epic quarter final win against Australia in Tokyo Olympics at the Oi Hockey stadium on Monday. The former Dutch hockey player is the man behind transforming the Indian women’s hockey team. In order to keep Rani Rampal, Gurjit Kaur, Savita Punia motivated and relaxed ahead of the quarter final clash against three times Olympic champion Australia, coach Sjoerd Marijne showed them a film after sealing a spot in quarters.
“After we qualified for the Quarters, I told the team about the importance of being in the moment and not thinking about what-ifs and that is very difficult for an athlete because there are many things that are constantly playing in your mind, things like what if we win, what if we don’t win, what if I don’t stop the ball, so what I did is showed the team a movie and the film is about staying in the moment and I think that made a big difference in this match against Australia,” Marijne said after the match.
On being asked what did she instruct the girls at the start of the match, the Dutch coach said, “Today, I told the girls to just play freely. The pressure is on the other team and that’s really important to know. The Quarter-Final matches are really difficult for the teams who are higher ranked. And I wanted the players to be proud of themselves today, regardless of the result. And I told the players that at the end of the match, they shouldn’t feel their legs after running so much on the pitch. We defended well today. The defensive structure during Penalty Corners was very good.”
Just like other sports, the Indian women hockey team also had very few opportunities to train and play practice matches ahead of the Olympics. But the likes of Rampal, Gurjit showed tremendous improvement since that loss to Great Britain in the group league match.“We didn’t have a lot of practice matches before the Olympics so we kept telling the girls to improve with every match. We focussed on every individual improving her performance and if the personal performances are better then the performance of the team will be better. We knew that we had to learn from every match that we play since we didn’t have a lot of games leading into the competition. After we lost 1-5 to the Netherlands, it looked as if everything was shattered, it wasn’t. We only needed to make a few small improvements.”
Lastly Marijne said, “This match also proves dreams can come true. If you start believing and you keep believing and you keep working hard, things can happen. You have to do the work to fulfill your dreams and that’s what we did today.”
Indian women’s team will take on Argentina in the semi final on Wednesday.