India beat Australia by 2-0 in practice match ahead of Champions Trophy

India-Vs-Australia-Practice-MatchBhubaneswar: Working hard in their practice sessions, India and Australia stepped on the field with full enthusiasm and buoyancy to play a practice match on December 3, ahead of the Hero Men’s Champions Trophy 2014.

Placed in Pool B, the Indian team looked more focused and gritty and dished out a wonderful performance against Australia, defeating them with a score of 2-0 on the board. The match saw goalless quarters for Australia where India did not allow their opponents to score even a single goal giving Australia a dry run at the end of the match.

Both the teams struggled hard between their hockey sticks but lost all the opportunities of scoring even a single goal in the first and the second quarters of the game. Whereas, the third quarter proved to be rewarding for the Indian men as it was in this quarter that Gurjinder Singh and SV Sunil proved their mettle and scored the winning goals for India.

Speaking on the win, India's High performance Director and Coach Roelant Oltmans said, “For us the most important thing is to look at our own games and we have been consistently trying to improve on a few of our weak areas learning from each match we play. We would like to improve game by game and the team did a much better job playing against the No. 1 ranked team - Australia. The game gave us a lot of scoring opportunities which in turn helped us to win the match over Australia.”

Speaking on the performance, Indian Vice-Captain, PR Sreejesh said, “This was our last practice match against Australia and now we are all prepared to give a much better performance in the upcoming tournament. After winning the match against Australia, we have gained a lot of confidence and hope that we end the tournament on a positive note.”

Speaking post the practice match played, Australian Head Coach, Graham Reid said, “Everytime we play, we strive to do our best. The Indian team has some very good players. They managed to control the game in the third quarter of the match and materialize all the scoring opportunities in their favour. We have a practice match on Thursday against Argentina and we will be looking forward to a good game against them.”

The Hero Men’s Champions Trophy 2014 will be telecasted live on Ten Sports.

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