Indoor / Close skills

Somebody picked up on an interesting aspect relating to the South African Olympic hockey teams which I thought I would briefly touch on - our inability to handle and control the ball in close in situations has let us down during this campaign.

The person I was chatting to believed that this has a lot to do with South Africas lack of interest in promoting indoor hockey.

Obviously indoor hockey is a much tighter game where there is a demand for much greater close in skills.

Indoor hockey is not treated particularly seriously in South Africa with many players simply using it as a warm up / knock around for the main outdoor season.

The lack of dedicated infrastructure (most of the games are played in school halls) has been an ongoing problem and there doesn't seem to be any obvious intention to change this.

Maybe this poor Olympic campaign will force a rethink.

The South African side looked good in open play but when compared to say the Australians, who showed plenty of composure under pressure in the circle, the SA sides seemed to lose possession or fire off a hopeful (hopeless?) shot.

Positive can be taken out
Identifying a specific problem that the South African sides can work on, is a positive. A failed campaign highlighted a weakness and we now know what we can work on.

The question though will be whether or not something is in fact done about it...