CHENNAI: Well. This is new. To give a boxing analogy, what transpired at the Oi Hockey Stadium was a fly lightweight boxer taking down the school bully, the super heavyweight boxer, by unanimous decision.
India’s women’s hockey side did really engineer one of the great takedowns in modern women’s history to advance to the semifinal of the Olympics on Monday. India, coming into the Games, had fewer appearances (two) than Australia’s number of titles (three).
The Hockeyroos only had to turn up. That was the general consensus.
The last time these two played at this stage, the 2016 Olympics, Australia scored in the sixth minute. They scored five more times.
It wouldn’t have been a surprise if Australia had scored six on Monday as well. In the second minute, they almost did.
A pass from the right was diverted onto the woodwork but the ricochet didn’t fall to an Australian stick.
Now, goalposts in field hockey cannot be more than 5 cms. It was pure luck that kept out Australia from going ahead after less than 80 seconds.
What transpired over the next 58 minutes and 40 seconds was no luck though.
India went toe to toe and trampled on Australia’s best laid plans to pen their own history in what has been the best 24 hours for the game in the country in more than 40 years (the Indian men’s team advanced to semis on Sunday).
But to really understand and make sense of how the women used the blue canvas to script something better than any movie, one has to wind the clock back to March 2017.
That’s when scientific advisor, Wayne Lombard, joined the squad. Since then, the South African has worked with the sole ambition of trying to make the women’s team the fittest in the world.
Since his appointment, their yo-yo scores have steadily improved from 16 to the 20s — the women’s team have better yo-yo scores than the Indian men’s cricket team.
He also conducted various physiological tests on the players before explaining to them how far behind the world they were. To rectify the situation, he put in place a process.
His only demand was to get the players to improve by increments by 0.2% on every fitness-related metric after every test.
“One thing I did introduce was that each time we tested, each player should look to improve by 0.2 per cent. This in statistics is the smallest change needed to be deemed meaningful,” he had told this daily in 2018.
It also meant that after 1 to 1.5 years, we would end up where we are now: great improvements.
It showed in the wilting heat at the Stadium. The players kept running, harried and hassled the Australians throughout the contest. They weren’t cowed or cared too much for the reputation of their opponents.
It was a mistake they made in 2016. Coach Sjoerd Marijne also faced another problem during the initial months of his second innings as coach.
They were losing to lesser sides. So he insisted on bringing two sports psychologists. In came Priyanka Prabhakar and Somya Awasthi.
Prabhakar even travelled with the team to Spain in 2019.
It was a calculated move because a few months later, India went to Hiroshima, won all five of their games, won the FIH Series Finals (the Olympic qualifier), scoring 27 goals. Rani Rampal & Co. were purring, silently.
Against Australia, they purred with the intensity of a rock concert on a Saturday night. They were everywhere and didn’t allow the Aussies time on the ball.
The willing runners meant they always had an outball, a basic tenet when you are defending a lead.
That lead was given by Gurjit Kaur whose expert dragflick snaked its way past several Australian legs before finding the board in the 22nd minute.
Even if India registered only one further shot on goal, this wasn’t a ‘park the bus’ defensive performance till the closing stages.
Custodian Savita and the backline should also take a lot of credit for the way in which they defended the Australian attacks.