A lackluster India today suffered their second consecutive defeat to crash out of the title race of Sultan Azlan Shah Cup hockey tournament and chief coach Paul Van Ass expressed his unhappiness over the performance of his players, saying that for the second day on the trot they gave away the match to the opposition.
Missed chances and sloppy defending continued to haunt India in the tournament as they yet again conceded a late goal to lose 2-3 to lower-ranked Malaysia at the Azlan Shah Stadium here.
"No, I am not happy with the performance. I am especially not happy with the way we started," Van Ass replied when asked about the performance of his players.
"I was happy with the performance against Korea. That was a matured game. I was relatively happy with the performance against New Zealand. We gave away that game in the end. But today we gave it away again. That's the story which we have to solve," a visibly disappointed Van Ass said.
"Our performance in the first two quarters was very poor. Our scoring rate is very low. We had a lot of field chances today. Against New Zealand as well there were a lot of chances. If you put them in the problem is solved but there is something wrong which we have to analyse and solve," he added.
Faizaal Saari (17th minute), Haziq Samsul (35th) and Shahrun Abdullah (58th) scored the goals to hand Malaysia their first win in the tournament after two consecutive defeats.
For India Rupinder Pal Singh (20th, 51st) converted two penalty corners but it was not enough to give Van Ass his first taste of victory.
"Towards the end we pushed for the third goal. The mindset was to try and score the third goal. But there we lost little bit of control and this can happens which is not good," Van Ass said about the goal which India conceded two minutes from the final hooter.
With just one point from three games, India are out of the race for Sunday's final.
