LUCKNOW: A three-year stint with SV Arminen that saw the club win the Austrian domestic hockey league for the first time in 15 years in 2013 was enough for Cedric D’Souza to impress the national federation officials there. Two years later, D’Souza was handed charge of the Austrian national and junior teams with an eye on qualifying for the 2020 Olympics.
The former India coach knew it was ambitious and the first test was the Junior World Cup here, the team for which he admitted was put together in a hurry.
“The club culture is very important there. We get the players only sporadically in terms of national camps. We have had just five weeks together. The national league got over in end-October and I gave them just two days off,” D’Souza said after his team lost its final practice match 5-0 to big boys New Zealand.
Austria qualified by virtue of finishing sixth at the European Junior Championships and is clubbed with former champion Australia, Argentina and Korea in Group A here.
D’Souza accepted that being here was in itself an achievement. That three players from the side here ply their skills in Second Division Bundesliga helped.
“Now that we are here, we want to make sure we are at least competitive in terms of our structure. We know we will make mistakes, that the other teams are going to blow us but we have to adapt as much as we can.
“We have played a lot of matches in the last five weeks so that the boys get out of their comfort levels and know what world hockey really is. We played in Germany, Holland, and England,” he added.
While the focus clearly is on building a side for Tokyo, D’Souza was realistic enough to understand that it was a slow process. “For us the games were a complete learning process. We know where we are, what our strengths and weaknesses are. We lost our first game 14-0 and the next 2-1. We also understand that nothing happens overnight, it’s a slow process. It’s not been slow for them, though, it’s shot up like a rocket for them,” he said.
