Australia played better than us and deservedly won the first leg of the two 4-Nation Cups in Canberra on Sunday. The holiday crowd was sizeable; their team had won the Cup in the end, still I feel they would not have returned home happily. Because, notwithstanding the flattering 3-0 in their favour, the home team, far superior than us in terms of physical strength and set piece drills, could not dictate the terms on the field. Due to our cautious approach, the match had to be played at slow pace, resulting into a dull game.

Australians play the game at a furious pace. They are well known for that. We did not allow them to be natural in the final, with a good defensive play coming from our midfielders and defenders. As these readers know, I believe in the Asian style of hockey that revolves around attacking, but on Sunday in the final, we could not play our own game due to injury problems. We had no choice than to play the way the situation demanded

Left winger Prabhjot Singh was rested for the full match as he did not recover fully from the back pain. Defender Kawalpreet Singh’s leg injury he sustained in the previous match against South Africa did not heal fully. Added to that Viren Rasquinha was also injured. With a result both Kawalpreet and Viren had limited time on the pitch. I moved Inderjeet Singh from midfield to fill up the vacuum created at leftwing with the exit of Prabhjot and new defender Harpal had more time on the pitch than in any of the previous three matches.

We were therefore forced to play a defensive game we are normally not accustomed to. Yet we succeeded to contain the nippy Australian forwards for most part of the game. With well structured midfield where Bimal Lakra and Ignace Tirkey played their heart out, we did not concede a goal till 31st minute.
Australia’s Travis Brooks, who was among the goals in all the previous matches in the 4-Nation competition, broke the deadlock with a field effort. Interesting to observe he opened the scoring against us when we met the Aussies on Thursday too.

The game was tight almost another 25 minutes before their centre forward Michael MacCann enlarged the lead, again through a field goal. Around that time we had a wonderful chance to score our goal. After Devesh Chauhan successfully defended a penalty corner, our forwards got a great opportunity to counter attack. But Arjun Halappa’s shot went to the right of the net. Perhaps, he could have parted the ball with Gagan Ajit who was ideally positioned to receive and score.

Just two minutes before the whistle, we gifted away a goal to winger Andrew Smith. This gave a feeling that we were outplayed in the final. This is not true. The fact of the matter was, we put the Aussies on back foot throughout the match. We had to play defensively due to injury problem but we rose to the occasion to contain them. The Australians struggled to break our strong defence. Goals were not easily coming. Our defense which often used to concede easy penalty corners kept it nerves cool. We gave away just three penalty corners and none of them were converted by the rivals.

As I often said, I am not looking at winning or losing but only trying out combinations of players and a strategy to play as per the changing situations. Yet I am hopeful we will improve at Sydney where the second leg will commence from Wednesday.