Amstelveen , India women’s hockey team coach Sjoerd Marijne admitted nerves got the better of his side in its goalless draw against Australia, adding that reaching the fifth-sixth place playoff at the World Cup is still a significant achievement.
It was not fluent, there was no rhythm in the passing and receiving and there were a lot of unforced errors,” Marijne told PTI after the draw. “You need to score goals to win matches, which didn’t happen against Australia,” he said. “It looked like there were nerves. We didn’t play the game we wanted to play.
“But if you had said five or six months ago that we were going to play the fifth-sixth position match, nobody would believe us. I also told the girls that we really need to learn from this,” he said. The Dutchman said India’s inability to convert their opportunities proved costly in a game where only a win would have kept their semifinal hopes alive. We need to be a little more calm in scoring positions around the goalkeeper,” he said.
India will now play the fifth-sixth place classification match, a position Marijne believes the team can take pride in reaching after making significant progress in recent months. “Defensively, we were very well structured and organised. The team was very disciplined and stayed on task. The major takeaway from the tournament is converting PCs and the opportunities we get.
That’s the way we will go into the next match,” he said. “We played a lot of matches this week. We will see the match and analyse where we can do better.
