Charlesworth, who led the Australian women's team to gold at the Atlanta and Sydney Olympics before taking over as coach of the Kookaburras in 2009, also pointed to the fact that the top seeds in the women's tournament, the Dutch, had no 8.30am starts.
"It's not that they are number one, again it's just that it's not equally shared when some teams have to play three early matches and others none," he said.
Meanwhile, Hockey Australia chief Mark Anderson reflected Charlesworth's dissatisfaction with the schedule.
"When you look at the schedule it is patently unfair in our opinion," he said. "None of the teams want to play in this early morning time slot.
"We have been scheduled to play at this time on three occasions. The world ranked number two, three and four teams do not have any matches scheduled for this time. The fifth and sixth ranked teams feature once.
"Out of the 12 teams in the competition, only six teams play at this time and Australia features three times. We are not looking for an unfair advantage, we just want to compete on a level playing field."
The criticisms are the latest in a growing list and come after the team played the test event at the Riverbank Arena on the Olympic Park and Charlesworth criticised the surface of the new pitch.
“The pitch is an issue: you make more mistakes than you would like and it brings down the standard of the game," he raged at the time, in early May, despite the fact that most of his key players had praised the surface.
"The ball bobbles a fair bit," he continued, "and it doesn’t reward skill. We have been playing on the one [blue pitch] in Perth for three months and it started off good and then it went bad and now it’s getting better.”
Source: www.telegraph.co.uk
No comments:
Post a Comment