Today, the Indian men’s hockey team defeated Australia in the Olympics for the first time since 1972. Captain Harmanpreet Singh, Abhishek, and coach Craig Fulton spoke exclusively to JioCinema about the match and their mindset moving into the quarterfinals. Below are the excerpts from the conversation.
Speaking on JioCinema, Abhishek, who scored the first goal in India’s 3-2 victory over Australia, discussed the magnitude of this win – “This is a massive moment. We’ve lost our last seven matches to Australia. This will give us confidence for the quarter-final, so this was an important win.”
Captain Harmanpreet downplayed the significance of the win particularly and focused on the task ahead – “Every win matters. Sometimes the result is in your favour, sometimes it isn’t. What you learn from the failures is what matters. As a team, we showed that if Australia is one of the best teams, we are also working hard to analyse and beat them. If we continue playing like this, we can beat anyone. Beating Australia isn’t the achievement, we’re still competing, and we know that the quarter-finals will be challenging.”
The captain also spoke about the quarter-finals – “For the next game, we will need to double the efforts. We know that we can’t lose our focus for even a second. Our mentality is to give our 100%. We’ll find out who we’ll face next, soon and spend whatever time is left to analyze them.”
Leading goal scorer at Paris 2024 Harmanpreet Singh shared his thoughts on Abhishek’s contributions to Team India – “We all believe that Abhishek is one of the best players in our team and is very talented. Whenever you score, your confidence goes up. I told you yesterday as well that it’s a good sign he’s scoring and helping the team lead.”
Craig Fulton discussed on the importance of momentum this game has given – “You can go 2-0 down in two minutes, it’s all about how you respond. You never win the game in the first quarter, you need to finish strong and today, we finished strong.”
Fulton also spoke on the team’s strikers peaking – “They are just calm and doing what they naturally do. They have an attacking DNA and its great to watch, nice hockey!”
