Tournaments at home are key to success: Sandhu

Published>Thu, Mar 18 10 04:48 AM

Even though the victory margin for Suranjoy Singh's victory on Wednesday was just 1-0 through RSC OC, the joy on the face of national coach Gurbax Singh Sandhu said it all. The diminutive boxer from Manipur landed three straight punches on Mauritius's Oliver Lavigi and if fellow boxers are to be believed, this is a new era for Indian boxing after the Beijing Olympics.

Having won 17 medals, including an elusive gold in the Asian championship as well as a bronze in the world championships, in international competitions in the last 11 months before the Commonwealth Boxing Championship, Indian boxers added six more medals to that total on Wednesday.

No time to relax

National coach Sandhu was all praise for his wards but maintained that the team could not relax before the Commonwealth Games in October. "This performance has given me a problem," he laughed. "It will be tough for me to stop the boxers from taking a week off, but I guess they deserve this before we get our focus back on the bigger aim. We still have to face most of the European boxers and next month's Cuban tour will provide us an opportunity to do so," Sandhu added.

Sandhu was also of the view that like China, India should host more tournaments to give boxers the home advantage. Before the Commonwealth Games in October, the Indian team will only take part in that training-cum-competition event in Cuba. "We recently went to China and the way they are preparing is tremendous. They had won four medals at the Beijing Olympics and the reason for their success is that they are organising more and more events in China. Now that we have got a world-level stadium, we should do the same," he said.

Sparring coach Jaidev Bisht said it was imperative for the boxers to have played against the biggest names in their weight category before a big event. "One of the positives here is that we won gold in the super heavyweight category. Even though countries like Australia and Canada missed the event, boxers from Scotland, England and Wales were a threat. The medal will boost the confidence of boxers like Amandeep (Singh) and (Paramjit) Samota," said Bisht.

Source: Web Search