Indian hockey team's fitness more than a match for the Dutch

One area the Indians would be more than a match for the Dutch would be fitness.

While the Indian hockey team has been among the fittest over the past decade, the physiques on the field during the final training session on Friday were completely different from what one saw even three months back.

With almost zero fat, lean muscle and improved strength and stamina, this could easily be a front-runner for the fittest Indian team at the moment.

At least seven of the players, including both seniors like Lalit Upadhyay, Manpreet Singh, Surender Kumar and youngsters Sumit and Jaskaran Singh, have managed to beat the 23.8 mark in the Yo-Yo test, the maximum possible.

The inside joke among the players is “generally sportspersons fail the Yo-Yo test. Here, Yo-Yo has failed us, get something more intense”.

A far cry from the times when Indians were automatically assumed to be inferior to Europeans and Australians.

For the record, the Indian cricket team’s fittest player at last count was Manish Pandey with a score of 19.2.