New senior hockey men’s coach Sihle Ntuli has big plans for the team. | Supplied
Siphesihle Ntuli, the newly appointed men’s national hockey team coach, is determined to turn the team from also-rans into medal contenders and to build on the team’s showing at the Paris Olympics.
It promises to be a challenging year for the national team, which includes the prestigious Nations Cup and Africa Cup of Nations. The Afcon is of particular significance, as it serves as a qualifier for next year’s FIH Men’s Hockey World Cup.
But it won’t be a new challenge for Ntuli, who has been an integral part of the senior team’s journey. The experienced former SA Under-21 coach has served on the coaching staff for both the Tokyo 2020 and Paris 2024 Olympic Games.
“We are working towards the World Cup, which is next year August in Belgium and Holland,” he said. “But we still need to qualify, so the immediate focus for the squad is qualifying through our continental tournament and that is in August this year. That’s the priority for 2025.
“However, before that we have another tournament in June, which is the Nations Cup, which we’ve got a good history with. It’s a new tournament that started two seasons ago. We’ve won it once and we finished third. So we’re going to use that tournament as preparation for the African Nations Cup in August.”
Ntuli expects tough competition from the likes of traditional rivals Ghana and Egypt.
He said at the weekend he got the team together for the first time since his appointment and they would have their first camp next month. And he already has an idea of how to take the senior national team to the next level.
“What I’ve noticed over the years is the amount of talent and depth that we have,” he said, “not just in the teams that have gone to competition but across the country, even looking at the U21 age groups, looking at our strong schools system.
“So, for me the exciting part is to actually try and align all those different age groups, as well as working with coaches from school level all the way to the U21 team, which we have now aligned already. We need to make sure that the pathway is working towards what we are looking for in the national team.”
“That’s one of the areas where I’ve felt maybe we’ve lacked in, that the senior management team is aligning our age-group hockey towards the end goal, which is the senior national team.”
A sign of their progress was their best Olympic finish so far in Paris in 2024.
“It was a very successful campaign with very limited preparation going into it,” Ntuli said.
“The team finished the highest it has ever finished at the Olympics, which was a massive success. We finished ninth out of 12 teams.”
“We’re always realistic about the nations that we compete with and the nations we believe we should be beating. It was really good for us to finish against nations that are in the same bracket as us when it comes to international rankings – teams like Ireland, New Zealand and France, who were actually the host nation.
:So, to beat them in the final game of the Olympics quite convincingly, it was 5-2, was a massive success for the team.
“But the goal that we’ve been talking about and we strive and continue to work towards, is getting into the quarter-final stages of major tournaments … and giving ourselves the opportunity to play in the play-offs. We know that in play-offs anything is possible and therefore we can start thinking about medals,” he concluded.
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