HOCKEY: Great Britain produced their best 70 minutes of the Australian Youth Olympic Festival (AYOF) women’s hockey tournament when they defeated USA 5-0 on Saturday morning.

This fixture was a dress rehearsal for tomorrow’s bronze medal match as both teams could not qualify for the final regardless of the result.

Three first half field goals to Great Britain through Hannah Martin, Lily Owsley and captain, Shona McCallin saw them to a comfortable 3-0 lead at the interval.

The USA put together better patches of play in the second half but were unable to really threaten the Great Britain defence.

Team GB added another two field goals as Martin scored a double and Suzy Petty was on the end of nice transition play through midfield helping her team to the final scoreline of 5-0.

“We set ourselves up a little differently today to help our legs to get through the game and it helped the game flow really well,” Great Britain’s coach Craig Keenan revealed after the match.

“We feel we could have gotten something out of both the Australia and China games and today we showed our ability in the circle where we hadn’t done that in the previous two games.”

Coach of the USA team Steve Jennings expected a much better performance from his side during the match than they produced.

“You have to give a lot of credit to Great Britain, they came out and were very sharp and ready to go from the opening whistle and we definitely weren’t,” he said. “Tomorrow we will be really keen to come out and have a much better performance and represent our colours right.”

The bronze medal match between these two nations will get underway at 8am local time on Sunday morning.

Beau Greenway
olympics.com.au