Team needs to be tough enough to get to next level, says coach Graham Reid

The tactician won the FIH Men's Coach of the Year for the second consecutive season.

Graham Reid has already scripted a memorable story as the manager of the Indian Men’s Hockey Team. Over the last three years, he’s transformed his side into one of the world’s best and gotten to fight with the big guns on the world stage.

India bagged the bronze medal in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and Silver Medal in the 2022 Commonwealth games thanks to his guidance. Khel Now got a chance to sit down with the Indian coach for an exclusive interview recently.

Challenges faced as India coach

Graham Reid has faced a number of challenges during his stint as India’s head coach. He detailed: “I’d probably say the toughest thing was that we had the Covid-19 outbreak in the middle of my tenure. You forget about it because it’s now drifted away, but at the time it was very challenging from all different aspects. We had to try and keep everyone safe, you weren’t allowed to do particular things and nobody knew what they were really doing. It was about keeping everyone safe. The lowest common denominator was the safety part.

“But it was also a really good part because the team got a chance to bond and I got a chance to know them better. That was a big challenge. But to be honest, every day there is some challenge that is coming to you as a head coach. It doesn’t even have to be coaching, it could be a rule change or something that pops up that is out of your control that you have to deal with. I’m a big believer that you can’t change what happened to you, but you can change how to react to them. Covid was a very tough thing to beat as a challenge, for everyone I’m sure,” he added.

What changes Indian Hockey has from other countries?

“When I first came here to India, I felt a little bit different than what I did in other countries. I felt that the three different playing styles that the Australians, the Dutch and the one that the Indians provide – you can find somewhere in the middle of that triangle is that it would be a great way to play hockey. Maybe subconsciously that’s where we‘ve tried to take these guys. I’ve tried to get them to get back to their roots and pay a very attacking style.

"Each of the teams can learn different hinges from each other. Perhaps what we saw from the Commonwealth Games, a big learning thing for me was that in the final when Australia faced England, they took things a little bit easy. England caught them off guard and played very well in the first half. Australia didn’t look like they were going to get back, but they did. They have the ability to fight back and the strength of character to know that hold on, this isn’t supposed to happen and that we’re supposed to win here."

“If you look at our Pro League results in the last 2-3 years, that's when we fought back and you saw us get a bronze medal against Germany. This team needs to be tough enough to get to the next level. We need the character to be able to go from 2-0 down to Australia to think that we can win this game. We still have a way to go with reaching that level, but it’s not as far as perhaps what people think,” he added.

Mental block against major sides

India suffered a 7-0 loss to Australia in the Commonwealth game gold medal match. When asked if he feels they have a mental block in games like this, Graham Reid explained: “I’d be kidding myself if I thought otherwise. There is a mental part that plays a role before the games. During 2013 and 2017 in the Hockey India League, I think some big steps were made with that because you are training with them and playing with them all the time. The Australian players have two arms and two legs, as we do. We didn’t have that for many years, we didn’t play Australia in the last period as well because they weren’t in the Pro League last season.

“That’s why I want us to make sure to get the most out of the trip coming in the November-December period. It’d be a desensitising project to help get us desensitized against the Australians. Once they understand that if we play well, and that’s what they worked out against Belgium and Holland, is that if we play well we can even beat Australia a couple of times. That’s the realisation that we need to come to for the Australian group and I’m confident that we can achieve that before the World Cup. It’s also closer than what it feels,” he added.

Areas of improvement for India team

Giving an idea of the areas of the team’s play that he wants to improve ahead of the 2023 Hockey World Cup, the coach said: “Historically, we may not have wanted to play against the team that is in your pool in the World Cup. The Pro League forces you into that. Before the Tokyo Olympics last year, we got an advantage because we played Argentina and Germany a lot. History says that it’s definitely not a major problem. But the sort of thing we’re working on in the last camps is that we want to develop a collective defensive mindset. It’s basically things like making our tackling is up to speed, that we have the best markers and we can get in front when marking our men and that we have our hot liners covered.

“But it’s about a team view of defence and not just one or two people, but everyone has to have that mindset. That is what I want to work on, which is developing a real defensive toughness about us. The other thing is that we’re looking at another type of pressing. We have 3-4 styles at the moment, but this would be a more aggressive one which we’ll use if we are down or if we need to force the game. Then you’d need different things to change the game around. Another thing is that you’d have seen that when the Indian players shoot at goal, it’s by using the long stick to hit the ball as hard as you can.

"I feel like we do that too much at times, and I want us to be more effective with smaller shots and to have the stick on the ground around the 5-6 meter area. I want to polish our guys more in that area. In some of the practice games, we’re starting to see that come out more. We’re trying to come out more, by scoring with a flick past the keeper or the push past the keeper – it always doesn’t have to be a big smash,” he added.

Thoughts on World Cup and analyzing squads

When asked if he feels the games against Spain or England in the World Cup can be expected to be high-scoring affairs, Graham Reid said: “I really can’t tell you about that. There are so many variables that happen. I know we’re working on that collective defence stuff, but it starts when we have the ball and the counter-control. We haven’t been fruitful enough to stop teams coming at us.

“In the World Cup, it’s like the Olympics – everyone is going to win and nobody will send a half-baked team. They are there to win. So what you tend to find in those games as compared to the Pro League, is that there might not be many goals scored in those games and people will be working more on the defensive structures,” he quipped.

Graham Reid also gave a fascinating insight into how he analyzes opposition sides and uses video analysis to improve his side’s play. He explained: “One of the analogies I use is that when a goal is scored and it doesn’t matter if it's us or the opponents, there is a series of things that go wrong. The concept comes originally from aircraft investigations. When an aircraft crashes, there are normally 4-5 systems that are put in place to ensure that a plane doesn’t crash.

“There are 4-5 things that will happen to cause it to crash. If you apply that principle to a goal being scored against us, then you can go back to when the play started and you can think – yes that’s now! If we have someone putting pressure on that player, if our defender was in a hotline and if our guy at the back had marked a little tighter and been in front, then the goal wouldn’t have been scored. Those little things are what is analyzed. So rather than just focusing on ‘goalkeeper made a bad save’, I tend to go into the beginning of the play to think about what can be changed to avoid that.

“That is the process I use to analyze what teams do, what we do wrong and what we do well and how we’ve been effective in the past. From a negative point of view, you try to stop those things and from a positive point of you, it’s how we can create those chances more. We use video for that, and the good thing is that our players are very skilled on the video analysis software.

"So after the commonwealth games, in the last camp, we got 4-5 groups together and we told them that you each have to watch a quarter of a game and have to come back with 2-3 clips of us with the ball, 2-3 clips without the ball and 2-3 clips of that which will make a difference in the future. That’s a way to get ownership from them but at the same time, the players are learning as they are watching things and presenting things. It’s good for the younger players, as they have the chance to stand up and give feedback,” he added.

Harmanpreet Singh and his legacy

Reid also gave glowing compliments for Harmanpreet Singh, who recently won the FIH Hockey Player of the Year award. He said: “I think that’s where your relationship with the player comes to the fore. Someone like Harman, you don’t get as good as he is without working hard and having a real inner strength to be good at something. As a coach as far as motivation is concerned is a very difficult job to motivate a particular player.

“What you can do is create an environment where they’ll use their internal motivation to drive them. That’s the job of the coaching staff, to keep challenging him and to ensure he is pushing himself to the best of his ability. You have to try to coax them out of their internal motivation. But someone like Harman is special, as he has that natural motivation inside of him,” he added.

Finally, Reid answered what legacy he wants to leave as the India hockey team’s coach before he steps aside. He said: ““Legacy is something which I don’t like the term, as it has a self-centred sound to it. I would like Indian Hockey to be successful in the longt-term. I don’t want the current success to be a one-off, I want the base and I want the next coach to be able to take what we’ve achieved in the last little while and keep it going. That is why I would love to see, that in 10-20 years time India is the Australia of Hockey. Because it was in the past. From an individual point of view, the team first has to be my biggest point which I talk about. I want to make sure that we’re not thinking of ourselves, but thinking of others.

“When you do that, good things happen. I was also thinking about the other day that Hockey players generally have this humility about them. Someone like Harmanpreet, if you meet him in the streets, you wouldn’t know that he was one of the best players in the world. He has a humility about him, and I feel that that’s a really nice thing if someone spoke good about the group of whom you are in charge,” he added.'