AIFF Media Team

NEW DELHI: With the Indian Senior National Men’s Team assembling in Mumbai for the preparatory camp for the forthcoming Hero Intercontinental Cup, Head Coach Igor Stimac mentioned that he is “looking forward” to see how the boys have worked on their individual working programmes.

In an interview with www.the-aiff.com, Stimac, who coached Croatia to qualify for the FIFA World Cup Brazil 2014, spoke at length about his plans in the camp, the response from the players, the “complicated process” of playing attractive football and much more. EXCERPTS:

How much are you looking forward to the camp?

I am eagerly waiting to get back to work. I miss my players and our daily work. I am looking forward to see how much they have done last few weeks with regards to the individual working programmes we provided to them.

How significant will the Hero Intercontinental Cup be in the team’s preparation for the World Cup Qualifiers from September?

It’s important we take the next step forward after beating Thailand on their home soil. Winning the Hero Intercontinental Cup would be great for us. But I am still not insisting on results. Instead, I would rather concentrate on improvement on ball possession, and movements without ball.

All our work has been chalked out concentrating on the upcoming FIFA World Cup Qualifiers. But obviously, every game we win on the pathway will help us to further boost our confidence.

What will you be stressing on at the camp?

As usual, we will divide the camp into two parts. In the first few days, we will work on testing the players. We will follow that up with drawing up the precise working programme, which will be our second step.

In this second step, we are going to intensify aerobic, and explosive power work during our morning sessions, and utilise our evening sessions for working on our gameplan.

How has you experience been with the boys so far?

Till now, I am extremely delighted with their commitment and willingness to learn and progress on their technical and physical abilities. To become successful in playing an attractive brand of football involves a very complicated process of work. But I stay confident that we are going to make it happen together.

What would be your message to the fans?

I would like to use this opportunity to invite all our supporters to get behind our boys and be our 12th man in Ahmedabad July 7-19, 2019.

ib continued his brilliant all round World Cup with five Afghanistan wickets, and also enjoyed the contributions of Mehidy Hasan and Mossadek Hossain in helping to restrain the Afghanistan batsmen.

“As a spin coach you cannot ask for more,” said Joshi. “Shakib is a legend, no doubt. It is a source of great pride that we have a player like that in the Bangladesh side. He is Mr Consistent for us be it with the bat, the ball or in the field.

“He has really focused on his fitness and lost between five and seven kilos recently. You can see how that has paid off with his running between the wickets, you can see the hunger in his cricket. His presence is really helping us to take our whole game forward.”

Joshi needs no second invitation to talk about the meeting with India, who are likely to include both Kuldeep Yadav and Yuzvendra Chahal in a battle of the turning ball.

“We all know they play spin well,” he added. “But so do we, we play spin very well and played it well against Afghanistan.

“We have shown in the white ball formats here and before this how we are a good side, we won in Ireland, we have beaten West Indies home and away and come close to beating India three times in the past three years.

“We have our own brand of cricket we are playing with the likes of Liton Das, Mushfiqur Rahim, Soumya Sarkar, Tamim Iqbal, then Mashrafe Mortaza with the ball, and the others.”

Joshi wants to bring his own experience of playing in England to bear - pointing out the way, for example, that the open grounds allow the breeze to continually change direction.

But he admitted he would enjoy another surface at Edgbaston similar to that at the Hampshire Bowl which made life difficult for batsmen against the slow bowlers, underlined by how Afghanistan’s spinners restricted India in their previous match.

“We have quality spinners, the same as India,” added Joshi. “How do you deal with them? Facing them and bowling to them it is the same. You think of it one ball at a time.

“Every team has their strengths and weaknesses. I have seen India very closely when we have played them. We know where to bowl to them.”