THE Malaysian Hockey Confederation (MHC) are disappointed with the national team’s failure to qualify for the Asian Games semi-finals, but feel it is too early to press the panic button.
The Speedy Tigers had set their sights on the gold medal which would have given them an automatic ticket to the 2024 Paris Olympics but they fell far short when they failed to even make it past the group stages.
MHC president Datuk Seri Subahan Kamal was calling for calm yesterday.
“It’s quite a disappointing result but all is not lost yet,” he said Subahan.
“It would have been nice to win a medal in the Asiad but our main goal is still to qualify for the Olympics and we still have a chance.
“The team need to go through the qualifiers in January. The boys need to be hungrier.
“I felt China was more hungry in the match,” he said, referring to the last group B match where China held Malaysia to a 4-4 draw.
That result saw Malaysia finishing third in the group.
Subahan acknowledged that the players needed to improve if they wanted to make it to the Olympics.
“The team need to improve a lot especially in defence,” said Subahan. “There were too many errors, they are conceding too many goals from penalty corners.”
Subahan, however, defended coach A. Arulselvaraj and was confident he could turn the team’s fortunes around.
“It’s not fair to blame the coach as he has also done so well thus far. He led the team to the Sultan Azlan Shah Cup after 39 years. For the past two years, the team has been doing very well and he won coach of the year award.
“I am 100% confident he can improve the team and fight for a spot in the Olympics.”
Meanwhile, Subahan would not comment on whether the team’s position in the Road to Gold (RTG) Olympics programme had become uncertain after the Asian Games failure.
“We will let the RTG committee decide on this,” he said. “It will definitely be good to still be included in the programme but we will accept any decision by the committee.”
