BANGKOK: India women’s hockey team winger Saba Anjum has achieved the rare feat of scoring the country’s 100th goal in Asia Cup tournaments when
she found the net in their opening match against Singapore on the first day of the ongoing sixth edition of the event here.
Anjum’s goal against Singapore was India’s one hundredth goal collectively in six editions of the event, but surprisingly, she was caught unaware of the milestone.
However, when this feat was brought to her notice Anjum merely said, “Good to hear this.”
Except for the inaugural women’s Asia Cup, India have participated in all editions of the event and have collectively scored 99 goals from 25 matches before the start of the tournament here.
The keenly awaited honour eventually went to Chattisgarh’s Anjum when she deflected home the rebound of Jasjeet Kaur’s penalty corner in the second minute of the match against Singapore.
Surprised over the fact that such kind of statistics are available in hockey, chief coach MK Kaushik said, “I thought only cricket has such kind of information. We are not good at having statistics, I am happy to hear this.”
“Saba (Anjum) in any case deserves some sort of recognition for her game. She was at her best at Kazan where we won the Champions Challenge II recently,” Kaushik said.
Former India goalkeeper Neeta Dumre, who is here as Technical Officer, expressed the view that hockey players achievement needs to be highlighted.
“Saba hails from Durg area, where lot of girls, including those from Muslim community are traditionally taking up hockey,” she said.
Anjum, employed with the Indian Railways, was the youngest member of the 2002 Commonwealth Games gold medal winning Indian team.
Though the national team participated in five editions of the women’s Asia Cup, goals were hard to come by. The Indian eves scored mere four goals in the 1989 edition, eight in 1993 and 24 in 1999 and 19 in 2004.
However, the goals tally for India went up in the last edition in Hong Kong when it amassed 40 goals in five outings and it is expected to pile much higher this time around as the eves have already collected 28 goals from their first two matches.