FIH Pro League | India resumes campaign against the Dutch

Indian men's hockey team aims for podium finish in FIH Pro League to secure World Cup berth and prepare for future events.

As the Indian men’s hockey team resumes international duties with its opening game of the European leg of the FIH Pro League against the Netherlands on Saturday, coach Craig Fulton will be looking to achieve several goals over the next 20 days.

While the team’s primary objective will be to finish on the podium to try and seal a World Cup berth, two big-ticket events in 2026 — the World Cup and the Asian Games — mean the current set of matches will also be important to identify the core of the Indian team and fine-tune game and training plans.

“This (Pro League) is one of the ways of securing qualification for the World Cup, so we are definitely putting that as a priority. Obviously, if it doesn’t work out, we have the Asia Cup in August, but we’ve been training well for this, we really want to try and finish as high as we possibly can and get on the podium,” Fulton said during a pre-match interaction on Friday.

India is currently third on the table with 15 points from eight games at home, one behind England and Belgium but the European leg will be a challenge both in terms of the opposition and the acclimatisation.

“We have six games in nine days and we have to travel from Amsterdam to Antwerp, which is two-and-a-half hours, then play the next day. So everything is geared around being physically able to cope with the load. We have four days off after the sixth game, then play Belgium in back-to-back matches. So everything we were pushing for was around being physically conditioned to play the best teams in the world, ” Fulton said.

“We’ve played some top teams already — Spain, Germany, England, Ireland — and now in Europe, we’ve got plans for all the teams that are coming up. We are realistically going to go one game at a time, try to get maximum points out of every game, not looking too far ahead. We have 24 players to keep the squad fresh to get through all eight games,” Fulton said.

The main target, he insisted, was to constantly improve. “The last time we played international hockey was in February, so we have a nice challenge playing Holland first, we want to get up to speed quickly tactically, convert our PCs (penalty corners) and field goals. We want to make sure we’re good structurally — we’ve been working on a lot of different structures, both defensive and attacking shape.”