It is the question vexing all the teams lining up to participate in this year’s men’s and women’s Junior Pan Am Hockey Championships. How to beat Argentina?
Since the Junior Pan Am Championships began in 1978 for the men and 1988 for the women, only one other team has managed to lift the trophy – the USA team in 2008.
While that USA team were very worthy champions, beating Chile in the final, it was actually Chile who put a dent in the Argentine domination of the event. A 3-1 victory in the semi-finals was a combination of well-taken chances and determined defence as well as the tactical nous of the coaching team of Ronald Stein, Alfredo Castro and Diego Wenz.
In that match, Chile took the lead through Christine Fingerhuth after Chile’s goalkeeper, Claudia Schuler, pulled off a string of great saves to keep Argentina at bay.
Argentina fought back and scored immediately after the break for half-time, Macarena Rojas latched onto a cross from Rocio Sanchez Moccia to equal the match. But where Chile might have been expected to retreat at this point, they defied the odds and marched back into the lead with goals from Sophia Walbaum and Camila Caram.
Despite this chink in the armour of the blue and white team, Argentina were back on song in the 2012 edition, with both the men and the women winning against Canada in the finals.
Canada’s coach is Steph Andrews and we caught up with her to find out just how she was planning on beating Argentina this time around.
“Argentina historically have always been classy. Their ability to be creative and play with flair makes it hard for teams to match up against them and stop their flow. Any team that is going to beat Argentina will need to be good defensively and take their opportunities when it counts.”
From Andrew’s point of view, Canada is definitely closing the gap on their south American rivals at junior level. She pinpoints developing depth within the junior squad as being key to this. “I believe we are establishing a good group under our senior team both at a junior national squad level and the development squads below that, all of which will aid in closing the gap between us and Argentina.”
However, Mariano Ronconi, coach of the U-21 Men's Team and Agustin Corradini, who is in charge of the U-21 Women’s Team would disagree with Andrews. Both men have been involved at the top level of coaching with Argentina’s men’s and women’s senior sides and bring that wealth of experience to the junior team.
Speaking of his team’s dominance in the competition, Ronconi says: “It is all about preparation. The continued success of Argentina in the Pan Am Games is due to many factors: we have a large pool of players to draw from; we play a lot of high level tournaments so the players are used to the pressure; and for this tournament, we have been working in a systematic way for the past two years doing concentrated training sessions each month. This ramps up to a higher degree now as we will be training together throughout the whole year.”
For Ronconi, it is the club system of Argentina that plays such a big part in player development. His players all compete regularly at the top level of club hockey in the country. This, he says, gives them unprecedented opportunity to gain match play experience and learn how to deal with the toughest demands of the game.
It is not just at club level that the junior Argentine men get to play alongside older, more experienced players. Ronconi says there is a lot of interaction between the senior international side and the U21 players. “Today we have a a lot of interaction between the senior and the junior. We try to train the same and play the same and sometimes train together. This means that young players who move to the senior team can make a smooth and gentle transition between teams. For the juniors, you can see the difference in their play as soon as they start mixing with the seniors.”
Corradini has a similar outlook. The coach has worked as an assistant with some of the great Argentina coaches of recent years and sees the same ethos and hockey culture reflected at every level of the game, from schools through to the senior program.
“Without schools, the recruitment process of young players would be more difficult. Without the specialist training provided through the clubs, nothing could be real. It really is a question of team work, between schools, clubs, and the national team.” he says.
In this way, Corradini believes that the young players who are selected at junior international level are already well on their way to being the ‘finished’ article. “There are good young players all over the country. When they get selected for the national team, they have already been part of very good development programs within their own clubs. We make sure that they have all the elements in place and then work with those qualities to make them even better – as a result our players have very good technical skills, they are perfectly physically trained, and they have a professional mindset.”
Unlike the men’s team, where the transition between juniors and seniors has been smooth, Corradini says that within the women’s team things have been a little trickier in the past few years. “I agree with Mariano, there is a lot of communication between squads. Junior coaches are also with the senior teams, so transition of knowledge is smooth. With the women however, last year the transition wasn’t like that because a lot of experienced players quit the national team. This caused some difficulty, but slowly this transition is getting very strong again. It will come with patience and hard work.”
And what of the question of Argentina’s impact on the Junior World Cup because, despite dominating the Pan American Junior Hockey Championships, both the men and the women have only claimed the world title once apiece – in 1993 for the women and 2005 in the case of the men.
“There are some differences in favour of teams from Europe and Oceania,” says Ronconi. “Water pitches are the biggest factor. We just don’t have many, so our players lack that experience.”
Corradini says the styles of hockey across continents are non-comparable. ‘There are just not points of comparison. Every country or continent has its good and bad points, but you are talking about continents, and even countries within the content, that have different cultures, different infrastructures, different distances between clubs.”
One bright spot for the teams seeking to dismantle the Argentine dominance of the event is the lack of international experience among the current crop of players. The junior men only played one international tournament last year, while Corradini says that budget constraints have limited the junior women’s team to one tour, albeit providing a great experience.
“We don’t have a lot of international experience because of budget. We just played some matches against Australia; that was an extraordinary experience for all the girls.
“One difficulty is balancing the players who have travelled and played with the senior team with those that have not yet had that experience. That is an impossible balancing act. Our solution is just to continue with the development program, giving those that are not playing senior international hockey the tools to improve and get stronger.”
And ominously for the teams lining up in Tacarigua and Toronto, Corradino says: “We believe the best results for Argentina ever are just around the corner.”
