After three starts the Hockeyroos have finally found a win and brought their Rio 2016 Olympic Games campaign to life with a big-margin victory over India.
Australia’s campaign in the women’s hockey got off to a poor start earlier at Rio with a 2-1 loss to Great Britain in the first match, followed by the same result against the USA.
A match against India proved to be just what Australia needed to kick-start their campaign. They were on from the opening minutes, with goals from Kathryn Slattery and Georgina Morgan putting them up 2-0 before ten minutes had been played.
From there it was a clear route to a comfortable win. Jane Claxton and Georgie Parker added two more goals in the space of two minutes later in the match, before Jodie Kenney scored a pair in the 43rd and 46th minutes.
The second of the two was Kenny’s 100th Hockeyroos goal.
Anuradha Thokchom scored India’s first and only goal in the 60th minute of the match, taking the sheen off what would’ve been a dominant shut-out, but it was still an enormously successful result from Australia.
It has immediately lifted them to third in their pool, with matches against Argentina and Japan to come before the finals are decided.
Win at least one of those two and a spot in the quarter-finals will be locked in. And from there, of course, anything is possible.
“It’s a wonderful win for us and puts us back into the tournament,” said Jodie Kenny after the match.
“We just had to get the win today and go from there and we are right back in this tournament. We play hockey like that and we will beat any team in this competition.”
Kenny saw the result as a great response after the disappointment of the first two matches.
“We couldn’t let the past games control how we played today. We had to just go out there and play our style of hockey and be really aggressive and really ruthless up front and that is what we did – we had two goals on the board in the first 15 minutes.”
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