India clinched a historic bronze medal at the recent Tokyo Olympic Games and ended the 41-year long year medal drought.

The core group will begin the new Olympic cycle with an intent to improve upon this performance at Paris 2024.

The core grouped called up for the national coaching camp includes a mix of young and experienced players including goalkeeper PR Sreejesh, Krishan Bahadur Pathak, Suraj Karkera, Harmanpreet Singh, Dilpreet Singh, Surender Kumar, Gurinder Singh, Amit Rohidas, Manpreet Singh, Hardik Singh, Nilakanta Sharma, Vivek Sagar Prasad, Simranjeet Singh, Akashdeep Singh, Mandeep Singh, Lalit Kumar Upadhyay, Gursahibjit Singh, Shamsher Singh, Varun Kumar, Jarmanpreet Singh, Dipsan Tirkey, Nilam Sanjeep Xess, Jaskaran Singh, Rajkumar Pal, Gurjant Singh, Sumit, Shilanand Lakra, Suman Beck, Mandeep Mor, Ashis Kumar Topno.

“The players are coming off a long and well-deserved break. I believe they will be excited to be back in the national camp and refocus on our goals for next year. We will be going through our performance in the Olympics both from the perspective of individual performances and as a team,” Graham Reid told hockeyindia.org.

The players must now leave behind the success of Tokyo and start fresh ahead of a hectic season in 2022, he insisted. “Experiencing success in the Olympics is great but now I want the players to be mentally and physically ready for a hectic season in 2022 with some very important tournaments starting from the FIH Hockey Pro League in February. This camp will be more about strength and conditioning and we will look at making a slow start,” he added.

Rupinder, 31, the defender was the best drag-flicker of the side while Lakra, 31 had over 200 international caps and was a product of the famed hockey academy of Sundergarh in Odisha. Sunil, 32 from Somwarpet in Coorg, Karnataka was not in the team for Tokyo but was a member of the team which won the bronze medal at the 2018 Asian Games.

Ramandeep Singh, Chinglensana Singh Kangujam, and Kothajit Singh were in and out of the team over the years.

Hockey aficionados felt that the announcement of the core group will trigger more retirements.

SQUAD FOR NATIONAL CAMP

PR Sreejesh, Krishan Bahadur Pathak, Suraj Karkera, Harmanpreet Singh, Dilpreet Singh, Surender Kumar, Gurinder Singh, Amit Rohidas, Manpreet Singh, Hardik Singh, Nilakanta Sharma, Vivek Sagar Prasad, Simranjeet Singh, Akashdeep Singh, Mandeep Singh, Lalit Kumar Upadhyay, Gursahibjit Singh, Shamsher Singh, Varun Kumar, Jarmanpreet Singh, Dipsan Tirkey, Nilam Sanjeep Xess, Jaskaran Singh, Rajkumar Pal, Gurjant Singh, Sumit Shilanand Lakra, Suman Beck, Mandeep Mor, Ashis Kumar Topno