S.V. Sunil’s late goal helped India’s men’s hockey team overcome a lower-ranked Wales with a 4-3 win in a Pool B match of the 21st Commonwealth Games in<\/p>\n
Gold Coast on Sunday.<\/p>\n
Wales’ drag-flicker Gareth Furlong’s hat-trick had threatened India and the latter was on the verge of playing second consecutive draw after the Pakistan tie. But<\/p>\n
Sunil scored off a rebound from a penalty corner with around two minutes to go.<\/p>\n
Furlong’s all goals were equalisers for their teams. His first goal came a minute after Dilpreet Singh’s field goal, a drive from the right in the 16th minute, gave<\/p>\n
India the lead.<\/p>\n
India regained the lead through Mandeep Singh’s tap-in off a penalty corner rebound in the 27th minute. Wales took 17 minutes to come up with the equaliser<\/p>\n
via Furlong, who exposes India’s shortcomings in defending the set-piece.<\/p>\n
Harmanpreet Singh scored in his fourth penalty corner attempt in the 56th minute to give India the 3-2 lead with four minutes left for the end of the game. But<\/p>\n
Furlong struck again past P.R. Sreejesh to make it 3-3 in the following minute. India once again lost composure and focus after scoring a goal which allowed<\/p>\n
Wales to launch a speedy counter-attack to earn a penalty corner which was poorly defended by Sreejesh and his defence.<\/p>\n
However, a minute later Wales, failed to fully clear Harmanpreet’s drag-flick. Sunil’s first attmept was blocked but he got hold of the ball again before hitting at<\/p>\n
the empty right post to make it 4-3.<\/p>\n
“I am happy with the win but not with our performance because we can do so much better than this. Though we were a better team today compared to our first<\/p>\n
match against Pakistan, we need to play our A game against Malaysia if we want to see ourselves in the Semi Final,” said Indian chief coach Sjoerd Marijne in a<\/p>\n
release.<\/p>\n
Following the win, India jumped to the second spot in the Pool B with four points — same as top-placed England but behind on goal difference. England played<\/p>\n
a 2-2 draw against a gutsy Pakistan in the other Pool B match of the day, with the Asian outfit earning third consecutive draw to be third in the table.<\/p>\n
India take on Malaysia in their next match, a team that heavily relies on penalty corners and on a good day can cause an upset win. After a poor conversion rate<\/p>\n
in penalty corners against Wales, Marijne would want his team to improve on this aspect.<\/p>\n
“We cannot miss any opportunity to score and today there were plenty of those opportunities. But I am hopeful the win today will give us a good moment for the<\/p>\n
next game,” he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
S.V. Sunil’s late goal helped India’s men’s hockey team overcome a lower-ranked Wales with a 4-3 win in a Pool B match of the 21st Commonwealth Games in Gold Coast on Sunday. Wales’ drag-flicker Gareth Furlong’s hat-trick had threatened India and the latter was on the verge of playing second consecutive draw after the Pakistan […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":27438,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[122],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27437","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27437","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27437"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27437\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27439,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27437\/revisions\/27439"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27438"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27437"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27437"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27437"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}