NEW DELHI — PR Sreejesh spent 17 months turning India’s junior hockey team into serial medalists, five podium finishes in five tournaments, capped by bronze at last year’s Junior World Cup. His successor’s first job is to take that same age group and throw it directly at Austria, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands, four European sides that do not hand out medals for effort.
The 22-member Indian Junior Men’s Hockey Team left for a 13-day exposure tour of Belgium on Sunday, its first assignment under new head coach Frederic Soyez and a direct preparatory step toward the FIH Junior Men’s Asia Cup later this year. The squad will play two matches each against Austria and Belgium and one each against Germany and the Netherlands, a schedule that trades the comfort of Asian competition for opponents ranked among the sport’s traditional powers.
Soyez is not a downgrade in coaching pedigree, whatever the loss of Sreejesh’s name recognition costs the appointment inside India. He earned 196 caps and scored 195 goals for France between 1995 and 2010, then spent more than 15 years as a head coach across three Olympic cycles, guiding Spain at both Rio 2016 and Tokyo 2020 before leading France at Paris 2024. He has specific junior-team pedigree too: he coached France to a silver medal at the 2013 Junior World Cup, the same tournament India hosted in Delhi that year, and most recently took France’s Under-18 side to silver at the 2025 European Championships.
Sreejesh’s 17 months in charge were not just successful by the junior program’s usual standard, they reset it. Five podium finishes across five tournaments is the kind of run that turns a caretaker appointment, Sreejesh took the junior job after retiring from international goalkeeping, into a program people expect to keep producing medals rather than simply develop players. Handing that expectation to a coach who has never worked inside Indian hockey before is its own kind of test, independent of anything that happens on a pitch in Belgium over the next two weeks.
Four members of the touring squad, defender and captain Anmol Ekka, Adrohit Ekka, Ajeet Yadav and Rohit Kullu, were part of the bronze-medal team at last year’s Junior World Cup, giving Soyez a core that already knows what a podium finish at this age group feels like. The rest of the squad is largely unproven at this level, which is precisely the point of an exposure tour: better to find out against Germany and the Netherlands in July than at the Asia Cup itself.
Hockey India framed Soyez’s hiring explicitly around a decade-long target rather than this month’s results, describing the appointment as part of a long-term plan to build a sustainable high-performance system ahead of a prospective home Olympics in 2036. That framing gives the federation cover if the Belgium tour goes badly, a development program is allowed rough results in year one, but it also means Soyez’s actual mandate will not be judged by this trip at all. The Junior Asia Cup, whenever it is finally scheduled, is the nearer test that will actually count.
The tour also functions as an audition for players outside the World Cup-bronze core, most of whom have no senior-level European exposure at all. Hockey India’s stated selection philosophy under Soyez has emphasized giving less experienced players match time against unfamiliar systems rather than protecting a settled first eleven, an approach that carries its own risk: an early heavy defeat to Germany or the Netherlands could just as easily read as evidence the development pipeline is thinner than last year’s bronze suggested.
Hockey India has not detailed what tactical adjustments, if any, Soyez plans to make to a squad Sreejesh built around a specific defensive identity, nor has it confirmed final dates for the Junior Asia Cup the tour is meant to prepare the team for. What the next two weeks will show is narrower and more immediate: whether a 22-member group that has mostly known Asian competition can hold up against four European programs in short order, under a coach they have known for less than two months.
