New Delhi: Looking back at the year 2018 that saw Indian women’s hockey team win a historic silver medal at the Asian Games and Silver at the Asian Champions Trophy, skipper Rani Rampal emphasised that her team no longer fears world’s top teams.
“Though we would have preferred to win gold at the Asian Games as well as the Asian Champions Trophy, I believe overall, we had a good outing in 2018. Beating England 2-1 at the Commonwealth Games, a 1-1 draw against them at their home turf during the Women’s World Cup and a low-scoring 0-1 loss to Australia in the semifinal at the Commonwealth Games has given the team tremendous confidence and a self belief that we can give top teams a run for their money in big-ticket tournaments. We are no longer considered an underdog team by our opponents and that’s our biggest takeaway from 2018,” emphasised the skipper from Haryana.
While their good show at the World Cup, where they made the quarter finals for the first time in four decades spurred their world ranking to career-best World No.9, Rani feels the Indian team has great potential to improve further in future events.
“The brighter side of 2018 was our U-18 team did well at the Youth Olympic Games where they won a silver medal. With fresh talents coming into the core group, the seniors too want to improve their individual performance to stay relevant to the team. I’m quite confident if we will continue to improve at the pace we are at this moment, we stand a good chance of climbing up the World Ranking further,” she said.