When their wishes didn’t come true Monday, the disappointment was equally enormous.
Advertisement
Three goals in 20 minutes for the Kiwis helped secure their place in the semi-finals, with only a late goal from Kathryn Slattery, her second of the match, giving the Australian women, led by central west products Edwina Bone (Orange) and Mariah Williams (Parkes) a glimmer of hope.
Katelyn Falgowski’s field goal three minutes from the end of the match gave the USA reason to believe, but the German defence showed vast composure in the final stages to claim a win that keeps their gold medal ambitions very much alive.
“We have to take the effort and all the emotions we had in this game back into the semifinal (against Argentina on Tuesday)”, Fuchs said. “You can’t have the fairy tale finishes when you want them”.
With their performance in Brazil, the US field hockey team also won the praise of actress and comedian Leslie Jones, who commented in a tweet about the players being serious despite wearing “the cutest skirts” – adding a profanity and saying, “man they got sticks and look at their thighs!” Despite pressing the Dutch within their own 23 for the last eight minutes, Argentina could not get off a shot, leaving them out of the Olympic medals for the first time in 20 years.
The Americans went 4-0 through the first four games of pool play – besting defending silver medalist Argentina and FIH No. 3 Australia – and entered the quarterfinals as the tournament’s highest scoring team with 14 goals.
With the sun beating down on the field at the Olympic Hockey Centre, it was the USA women’s field hockey team that truly felt the heat on Monday morning. Asked if she had another Olympics in her, Falgowski, just 27, sounded optimistic. “It’s what happens. We’ve been there before”. “It sure doesn’t feel good ending on that note”.
Germany’s desperation to make a strong comeback saw them score two goals in the final quarter. After that it was very hard for us to come back into the game. We’ve been there before. “We have an unbelievable team”. “We watched a lot of videos of the Germans before this game”. I think we’ve never beaten them in an official tournament. Briggs was there yet again for the save and Penn Manor product Jill Witmer earned the US its second corner five minutes later, but Dawson’s drag flick was stopped again.
Another great opportunity was foiled at the start of the third period when Katie Reinprecht took a pass off a breakaway near the German cage but a defender intervened.
McLaren chose the flawless time to open her penalty corner account in the tournament to shoot over the head of Jodie Kenny in the seventh minute.
For Belgium, they will have to continue playing the style of hockey they are used to. We rebuilt ourselves a little bit after the first period but things just didn’t fall our way.
Advertisement
“We’ve been building through this tournament and I’m excited about what we can do”.
