For a moment, Craig Fulton may have been just a bit concerned when China levelled matters at 1-1 with four minutes to go for half time in the Asian Champions Trophy game on Thursday.
But the concern didn’t last long and the India coach had his skipper to thank. Harmanpreet Singh slammed home from a penalty corner a minute later and the hosts never looked back, going on to seal a 5-2 win at the Olympian Surjit Singh Hockey Stadium.
After a 13-0 demolition of Bangladesh on Tuesday, the second successive win put India on top of the six-team standings.
Harmanpreet struck again, just after the break. With Sukhjeet Singh scoring a brace and Jugraj Singh also getting on the scoresheet, the second half was relatively tension-free for the India coach. Altogether, three of India’s five goals came via penalty corners.
“It’s just about us getting more consistency in all the quarters. It’s a positive takeaway, and not just being good in two or three quarters,” the South African was quoted as saying after the match.
“Penalty corners were strong from us, and our defence was good on penalty corners,” he said, despite the Chinese scoring both their goals from set-pieces.
India had taken the lead with a couple of minutes left in the opening quarter, with a piece of individual skill from Sukhjeet. Jugraj’s vision helped him spot Sukhjeet in space in an advanced position on the right flank, and a scoop found the forward with only goalkeeper Huanyu Wu to beat. But Sukhjeet still had a lot to do and showed exemplary skill to control a bouncing ball before lobbing it over the Chinese custodian and into the cage.
That goal relieved the home team who had been frustrated till then by the resolute Chinese, who had not even made the semifinals at the recent Aichi-Nagoya Asian Games, even though there are quite a few players in the team who didn’t feature in Japan. Fulton indicated so, admitting that the first Indian goal came “against the run of play.”
“We created a lot but we didn’t take our chances in the D. I think we had like six or seven circle entries in the first seven minutes, and we didn’t get a PC, we didn’t get a goal shot. So we didn’t connect well enough up front,” Fulton said.
A lot of it was due to the shape, tactical discipline and resoluteness of the opposition.
“China is a good team. They defended well, ran hard and enjoyed the game. Maybe we could have scored a few more but it wasn’t to be. I think there were six or seven new players from the Asian Games. The Chinese goalkeepers did well,” the India coach felt.
In their first game of the tournament, China went down 4-5 to Asian Games silver medallists Malaysia. In earlier games, Malaysia beat South Korea 3-1 while Japan secured a narrow 1-0 win over Bangladesh. India will take on Japan in their third game on Friday.