India’s win against New Zealand on Sunday. January 14, 2024, kept the women’s hockey team’s Olympic hopes alive but being third in a four-team pool with just one game to go isn’t the ideal situation coach Janneke Schopman would have wanted.
With a day’s break on Monday to regroup and get their act together before the final group match against Italy, the Indian team stuck to its routine of only the goalkeepers training for more than an hour. The New Zealand game gave enough indications that the team had managed to shake off the reversal against the USA but it knows it will need to stay on top of its game to avoid any mishaps.
From a disjointed, dysfunctional scattered group to a cohesive one, the turnaround in less than 24 hours was welcome. “I think it was just a shift in mindset. Yesterday we were not good, we struggled as a team and we fought and tried but couldn’t make it click. More than me, the girls had a meeting and then we prepared for NZ. It was just about figuring out how to play hockey again and I think we did that today,” Schopman admitted after Sunday’s game.
