Favourite Germany became the first team to ensure a spot in the knock-out rounds with a 2-1 win against New Zealand. Despite an equally patchy performance as in the opening game, the team did enough to get full points with its second win of the tournament, led by the experienced duo of Timm Herzbruch and captain Constantin Staib.
As happens against most top teams, New Zealand packed its defence and relied more on counters to try and score. Germany dominated, both in terms of possession and attempts to score, but was unable to break past the crowded Black Sticks' defence. While Germany wasted its first penalty corner, Sam Lane put New Zealand ahead after earning a penalty corner of its own on counter.
It took a brilliant turn-and-shoot from Herzbruch to level scores in the 24th minute before Anton Boeckel scored the winner after being put through by Johannes Grosse from the top of the circle in the second half. “We did not dominate as much as we wanted to. We have qualified for the quarterfinals which is a good thing but we should have done better,” a disappointed coach Valentin Altenburg admitted.
The results:
Pool A: Argentina 1 (Tomas Domene) drew with Austria 1 (Oliver Binder); Pool B: Belgium 4 (Philippe Simar, Henri Raes, Alexandre van Linthoudt, Alexis Lemaire) bt Egypt 0; Netherlands 7 (Bram van Groesen 2, Thijs van Dam, Thierry Brinkman, Terrance Pieters, Daniel Aarts, Jorrit Croon) bt Malaysia 2 (Muhammad Zaidi, Amirol Arshad);
Pool C: Spain 4 (Lucas Garcia 2, Marc Serrahima, Pablo de Abadal) bt Japan 1 (Atsushi Sugiyama); Germany 2 (Timm Herzbruch, Anton Boeckel) bt New Zealand 1 (Sam Lane).
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