Buddah's Blog
Finishing on a high note
Hey Everyone,
I thought I should put a close on the World Cup as it wasn’t all bad in the end. Due to Pakistan’s poor finish of finishing last at the World Cup after losing to Canada 3-2 in extra time (11th & 12th playoff) meant that our overall World Ranking went from 8 to 7 in the World moving us ahead of Pakistan. The whole of the Pakistan team including two 17 year olds retired after their poor showing.
We also have a very strong possibility of now having 2 Oceania Olympic Qualifying spots. This means if we were to lose to Australia in the qualifying tournament we would still qualify for the Olympics which means we wouldn’t have to go to a must win 6 nation tournament (the same as in North Harbour in 08 and Invercargill last year for the World Cup).
This is a shining light in a tournament that had little to write home about. We were all disappointed with our finishing position of 9 as we had high hopes for our team. We suffered loses of instrumental players throughout the build up to the World Cup that in the end proved costly. Brad Shaw, Hayden Shaw and Simon Child were unavailable due to personal reasons. Phil Burrows, Dave Green and Joel Baker all suffered injuries leading up to and during the tournament which cost their place in the team.
Although we had all of these setbacks we still had a team that could have and should have achieved higher than we did. We proved this in the gutsy win over Korea but then quickly came back down to earth after the loss to Argentina which cost us a possible semi-final and definite top 8 place.
It was a good thing to finish on a high note beating South Africa in the last game. This was largely thanks to a stellar drag-flicking performance by Andy Hayward who scored a hat-trick of goals one of which was after the full-time whistle to take the game into extra-time.
The game went all the way through to strokes where Kyle Pontifex made a couple of brilliant saves and the cool calm and collected Dean Cousins slotted the sudden death stroke to win the game. I believe the win was a fair-reflection of the game as we dominated large periods. But credit to South Africa as we could never quite finish them off.
The tournament was an interesting one. Everyone said that the opposite pool to ours was the toughest pool but as you can see our pool won 4 out of 6 of their final play-off games. The opposite pool already had all of its pool placing finalised before the final pool game. All of our pool went down to the last game of the day to decide where teams played off for.
India finished 8th one place ahead of us and only won one game all tournament. We won 3 games and that was the same as Korea who finished 6th. This showed us how tough our pool was and ultimately how important our goal-difference was.
The finishing places of all the teams are as follows:
1 Australia
2 Germany
(Australia 2 Germany 1 in World Cup Final)
3 Netherlands
4 England
(Netherlands 4 England 3)
5 Spain
6 Korea
(Spain 2 Korea 0)
7 Argentina
8 India
(Argentina 4 India 2)
9 New Zealand
10 South Africa
(New Zealand 4 South Africa 4)
(New Zealand won 5-4 in Sudden Death Strokes)
11 Canada
12 Pakistan
(Canada 2 Pakistan 2)
(Canada won 3-2 in Golden Goal extra-time)
Our flight home was a long one but all of the guys were extremely happy to be home after a long time living out of a suitcase and spending most of our time inside a hotel and at the hockey pitch. Everyone parted ways with many players heading to Europe or their homes around NZ to play for their respective club teams. Good luck to everyone with their up and coming games and hopefully we can do NZ proud at our next major tournament in July/August at the Champions Trophy.
Kind Regards,
Shea