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Men’s sixth Challengers Hockey Cup will be held in Johannesburg, South Africa from 26^th November to 4^th December. Eight teams are participating in these tournaments which have been divided into two pools. India, Belgium, South Africa and Poland have been kept in pool ‘a’ while the pool ‘b’ contains Argentina, Canada, Japan and Malaysia. 24 hockey matches will be played during this tournament which will be telecasted live on Ten Sports channel. The opening match will be played between the pool ‘b’ teams of Canada and Malaysia from 11am according the South African standard time.

Indian team is being led by 27 year old Bharat Chetri who has the experience of playing 116 international hockey matches.  P R Shrijesh, Manjeet Kulu, Rupinder Singh, B R Raghunath, Sandeep Singh, Gurbaz Singh, Sardara Singh, Arjun Halappa, Manpreet Singh, Sawaranjeet Singh, Yuvraj Valmiki, S V Suneel, Darnish Murtaba and Tushar Khandekar are the main members of the team. Except it, Shawinder, Birend er Lakda and C Kagjum have also been included into the Indian Hockey team squad while Rajpal Singh, Ignis Tirki, Bharat Chikara, Ravi Pal and Gurwinder Chandi have been rested.

This championship’s first opening match was played in2001 in Kualalampur and Indian team had won the championship by defeating South Africa by 2-1. 2003’s Hockey Challengers cup was held in Johannesburg and the trophy was won by Spain which defeated Korea by 7-3. Argentina won this trophy twice in 2005 and 2007. In 2005, it defeated the Korean team by 5-2 in Alexandria and in 2007 It won the final from New Zealand by 3-2 in Boom. But in 2009, New Zealand won the final by defeating Pakistan by 4-2. India remained at 3^rd position in this tournament in the years of 2007 and 2009. New Zealand won the 2^nd place in 2007 and 4^th place in 2003. Pakistan could won the 2^nd place only once in the year of 2009. South Africa won the 2^nd place in 2001 and 3^rd place in 2003. Belgium had won the 4^th place in 2005’s championship. England had won the 4th position twice in the years of 2005 and 2007. In 2001 Malaysia had won the 4^th position.

Only seven nations have played the final matches of this tournament which is held after two years. The upcoming match time table has been mentioned in the table below.