The Indian Men’s Hockey team recorded an emphatic victory in their first Pool B fixture where they thrashed Ghana 11-0. The Men in Blue then drew 4-4 against England in their second game. India defeated Canada and Wales in their next games to qualify for the semifinals. The Manpreet Singh-led team then registered a comprehensive victory against South Africa in the semifinals to book a place in the final.
India entered the gold medal match having scored 30 goals and conceded only seven. India had the second-best better goal difference as compared to other teams participating in the 2022 Commonwealth Games. Only Australia were ahead of India and it seems this difference in goal difference made a lot of difference for India in the final match. The team tried everything at their disposal but could not breach Australia’s defense even once.
India settled for the silver medal with an embarrassing 0-7 defeat to the defending champions and now coach Graham Reid has blamed the lack of intensity from the Indian players for the loss. Reid said that India did not have the energy and application that was required to beat Australia. He further said that the team let themselves down.
"There is a thing called energy and I don't think we had that today," Reid told PTI after the match. "When you play Australia this can happen sometimes. But I'm disappointed we didn't play well at all. We let ourselves down and all the things we talked about we didn't do. It's disappointing."
"We could not get pressure out of the ball today, we needed to do that. We talk about getting in front of the day," Reid added. "Pressure will always be there at the big stage. It's never away, who knows what history is in store, it's hard to gauge. I told them that the most important thing was to play our best and the result will look after itself. As I said we have got a lot of work to do."