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GCC teams intensifying preparations
Phillip Fernandes
Kaieteur Sport recently solicited comments from GCC Head Coach / player Phillip Fernandes on the club’s preparations for the upcoming Diamond Mineral Water International Indoor Hockey Festival which is set to be played from December 3-6, at the Cliff Anderson Sports Hall.
According to Fernandes GCC has entered teams in the men’s, women’s and veterans competitions.
Here is the text of the interview:
How has training been going for your teams?
Training has been going well, but it is always difficult to prepare for indoor competitions as the Sports Hall, especially being a multi-sport facility it is seldom available for hockey training.
We, therefore, do most of our practice on concrete although the tournament will be contested on wood floor.
Most of our club sides have had to use the only available slots during the week at 05:00hrs which requires some sacrifice and then players of course have to go to work after a hard morning session.
Fortunately, this upcoming tournament comes one month after our GT&T national indoor and so our teams have been practicing indoor hockey for several months now and should just be in the fine-tuning stages.
Are you satisfied with preparations and will they be ready in time for the tournament?
Our men’s team had suffered a few setbacks as some of our key players, Dwayne Scott and Orlando Semple, have been injured since the national indoor and are only now returning to practice.
Fortunately they are both in good physical condition and should be able to fit back into the team’s routine over the final week.
Some of the junior players have shown admirable improvement and although we will make every effort to be successful, we see this as a good opportunity also to expose some of our younger players to top level competition.
Our challenge is therefore to educate the newcomers to the side with the tactical aspects of our game as the heavy schedule of the tournament will require each team having a deep bench or suffer in the dying minutes.
Our ladies side is quite different as we have a full squad of experienced players despite the fact that one half of our players are under 21. The junior side have just recently returned from victory in a junior tournament in Trinidad which has built their confidence and no doubt brought their level even closer to that of the seniors.
The ladies have been practicing in full numbers and although there have been a few minor injuries, the depth of the squad makes those negligible to the teams overall performance.
What about your teams’ chances in the tournament?
We have the luxury of having won both the men’s and women’s national indoor titles last month and this shows that the teams are playing well and that will give them additional confidence going into the International Festival. On the negative side, we suffer the possibility of complacency where teams forget the kind of effort it takes to win at this level as over-confidence creeps in.
A brief lapse in concentration is all it takes in indoor hockey for opponents to amass a substantial lead and our challenge will be to play with intensity from the beginning.
Our men’s team has not done well in this Festival in the past and they hope to reverse their fortunes this time around.
The ladies team has been improving with each passing tournament and have not lost a single women’s competition since January of 2008.
They are the two-time defending champions of the International festival and will field their strongest line-up to-date in this upcoming competition.
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