The perennial problem of low penalty corner conversion has impacted India in the ongoing Asian Champions Trophy, but chief coach Craig Fulton is not too perturbed, saying such bad days from set pieces won’t “stay forever”. The South African is happy with the fact that his side is finding the back of the net from field play.
“I think we defended well, and that helped us put an attack in place. So, we were able to defend from a lot of areas in the field that helped us counter, which is good. We scored some field goals, which gave the boys some confidence,” he said after Sunday’s 5-0 win over Malaysia. “As far as penalty corner conversion rate (in this match) is concerned, you will have a bad day, but it won’t stay bad forever. And we had a good balance today (Sunday).” In the 1-1 draw against Japan, India secured 15 penalty corners but converted just one. The grim reality continued against Malaysia on Sunday, when they just converted two out of 10 set pieces. Asked about the areas of improvement, Fulton highlighted that his boys could have received a lesser number of cards, besides being more tactically aware of the opposition.
“We got two yellow cards that I need to look into again. But the improvement areas are just general. It’s being tactically aware of what the opposition is doing and how we play in that phase.
We are not yet where we need to be upfront as a team, but that’s ok,” he said. India will next take on defending champion South Korea on Monday. You’ve got to do it all over again and take nothing for granted. And it’s a back-to-back game, so it will be tough. We will look at what happened tonight (Sunday), take the positives, and go again,” he said.
