STICKING TO GOAL

Kookaburras captain ready for his final act

BEFORE he steps into retirement, Australian hockey captain Mark Knowles has turned to face the ghost that has been stalking his side for a decade.

It is one of the greatest mysteries in Australian sport … why the Kookaburras are supermen for three years in a row then get a touch of the Clark Kents during Olympic years.

Australia are raging hot favourites to win the Commonwealth Games gold medal as they have won all five gold medals since hockey entered the Games in 1998.

Over the past decade Australia have won six of the past seven Champions Trophy tournaments, the past two World Cup and World League finals yet semi-final fade-outs in the 2012 London and 2008 Beijing Olympics sentenced them to bronze medals and they missed the medals completely in the last Olympics, at Rio in 2016.

Knowles’ theory is that something changes in Olympic year which subtly but significantly alters the mood of a team that goes from being a hardworking yet fun-loving group of semi-professionals with a balanced life, to a more professional bunch who become dangerously consumed with their sport.

“You get this group of young guys who surf and study and work part time and have fun for three years and we win everything,’’ said Australian flag-bearer Knowles, who will lead his side into their Games opener against Ghana tomorrow.

“Then we get into the Olympic year and we are not allowed to work, study or play club hockey. People don’t have a get-out.

“I am lucky. I have a family so when I come home the kids don’t care whether I had a bad training session.

‘‘But if you are between 20 and 30 and have nothing else, if the things you are used to in life are not so much taken away from you but held back it can be a struggle.

“In the middle of my career I struggled badly for a while because hockey was my life. When I had a bad training in the morning I would go home and think about it all day and I would still be thinking about it at night when I went to training.

“The hardest thing about being in teams that want to be so, so good is that you get to a stage where you are really good and where do you go?

“We talked about it every day and we said ‘ The Olympics are coming’ and this is what the Olympics are like and it’s really hard and there is a lot of media.

‘‘Then you get to the Olympics and you still can’t comprehend how big it is.’’