Rebooted hockey aspire glory

Bangladesh national hockey team intend to emulate the fast-paced and high-intensity playing style of world's hockey giants with the title of the upcoming AHF Cup in sight, scheduled to get underway on March 11 in Jakarta.

 The national team are scheduled to leave for Indonesia tonight to take part in the 10-team tournament from which top three teams advance to the Asia Cup while the top five qualify for the Asian Games.

"We want to become champions but go match by match. In last 15 days, we watched the matches of Belgium, India and other countries," captain Sarwar Hossain told the media yesterday.

 "We also tried to implement that formation [of India's and Belgium's] in our lone practice match against BKSP. Now we are looking forward to implementing that in the AHF Cup," informed Sarwar.    

After unveiling the jersey during a photo session event in Dhaka yesterday, Bangladesh Malaysian coach Iman Gobinathan Krishnamurthy told the media that he is satisfied with the overall preparation.

"The boys trained well in the last three weeks and we had three sessions including one video session every day," informed Krishnamurthy while adding that he is not too aware of his immediate opponents.  

 "Obliviously, China and Oman are higher-ranked sides than Bangladesh but we don't know about China, Oman, Sri Lanka and Indonesia because all of participating teams were out of international engagement for a long time."