The Indian Express (Delhi Edition)
Climbing Alps, conquering Mt. Australia
Mental coach Upton says players stopped giving too much ‘ respect’ to opponents and were given clear game plans to execute
UNDER THE scorching Paris sun, India’s hockey team defeated Australia at the Olympics for the first time in 52 years on Friday. Its backstory was written in the cool climes of the Alps.
Paddy Upton doesn’t part with a lot of details. But the renowned sports psychologist, here with the Indian team, shares enough to tease and raise curiosity.
The South African, who is a part of coach Craig Fulton’s support staff in Paris, talks about borrowing ideas from his time with India’s cricket team — who, too, were at one point giving too much ‘ respect’ to their opponents — and ensuring players stayed away from their phones and social media, which he calls ‘ distractions’.
It was the trip to the Alps, however, which helped them conquer their mind, an aspect many coaches — past and present — said was a reason that held them back against teams like Australia.
Before landing in Paris, the Harmanpreet Singh- led side, which will face Britain in the Paris Olympics quarterfinals on Sunday, spent three days in the Alps at the training base of adventurer Mike Horn.
There, the players were ‘ moved further out of their comfort zones than what they've ever been moved out of’, Upton says, and were made to do things that, if gone wrong, would have had ‘ much worse consequences than losing in a hockey match’.
“The whole idea of going to Switzerland was to put players in a place they've never been before, where the adrenaline is up, the mind is going crazy. And there is a genuine fear,” Upton tells The Indian Express.
Upton adds: “We did things in the mountains and on cliffs that 100% no player has ever done before. And that very much triggered their anxiety and their adrenaline. There were a number of places where players needed support to be able to actually do things that were genuinely scary. We had very good safety, but if you made a mistake there was the possibility of there being much worse consequences than losing a hockey match.”
The purpose of this was to bring the players an experience of being out of their comfort zones, a feeling they would repeatedly face at the Olympics. “Many players who haven't been at the Olympics, when we get to the finals, will be in a place they have never been before,” Upton says.
The team, Upton immediately stresses, isn’t getting ahead of itself just based on one win against a rival whom they had never beaten on this platform in the artificial turf era. “Were I and Craig happy with what we planned and then what happened on Friday? Yes. It's not going to guarantee that we would win gold, but it will hopefully contribute towards the chances of winning gold.”
The win has renewed the hopes of another podium finish from the hockey team, whose build- up to the Paris Games was far from being smooth results- wise. In April, when the team travelled to Australia for a five- match test series, they couldn’t win a single game. And later, in May and June, Fulton’s side had difficult outings in Belgium and England during the Pro League.
Upton says the win against Australia can be traced to the tour Down Under, where they studied different aspects of the Kookaburras’s game. “For us, it wasn't so much about winning those games or beating Australia in Australia. It was understanding Australia's game, understanding them better, better understanding their mindset, understanding their psyche, and creating plans that when we meet Australia, when it really counts, we have it enough to be able to counter them and hit them,” Upton says.
Fulton, he adds, devised a plan for each of India’s opponents so that his team wouldn’t be a ‘ predictable opponent’. Upton, on his end, did what he also did with the Indian cricket team.
The South African, who was in the back room staff of Gary Kirsten when India won the 2011 World Cup, says he saw parallels in how India’s cricket team approached a ‘ big team’ back then to how the hockey players do now.
“One of the things Indian teams have been doing, and the cricketers were guilty of this up to a decade ago, is giving too much respect to an opponent, which you already go in with a mental inferiority if you over- respect an opponent,” Upton says.
If India were overwhelmed by Australia’s ‘ big, fast and physical’ presence, he worked to convince the players that their attributes — ‘ small, skilled and generally not aggressive individuals’ — were not a ‘ liability’.
This was done with the use of evidence — showing the videos of their skills and having ‘ clear game plans to counter everything that Australia can throw against us.’
It pleased him that after defeating their nemesis for the first time at the Olympics since the Munich Games, India’s players did not indulge in exaggerated celebrations.
“I was very happy to see that the players took some confidence. But there were no big celebrations. When a team overly celebrates a win before the final, that's normally a red flag for me. It says that you've hit a big goal and there's normally an energetic drop after that,” Upton says. “So, we're all very clear and the language has been very clear. You know, we won a game, but this is just another step on the journey towards where we want to go.”