What a difference a week can make.
We started the Hawke's Bay Festival of Hockey eight days ago with a loss to Japan and so the tournament started a little slowly for us. The nice thing is that we have improved our play as the games have gone on and we are now right in the hunt to defend the Vantage Hawke's Bay Cup we won in 2016.
One of our main squad focuses as we moved into 2017 was to make sure that we finish tournaments strongly and it is pleasing that, so far, we are doing that at the Festival. We are also focussing on going into each match with a positive mindset and really believing we can win the match.
The late draw we achieved in Thursday night's game against Australia in round five was so vital to our chances of making the final. It took until the 52nd minute to level the scores and it would have been nice to push on for the win but the draw is very pleasing from our point of view.
I believe we played well in that match and can take a lot of positives into our final round robin match against the USA. The US showed exactly what they are capable of with a solid win over Japan on Thursday. It will be the fourth time we have played them in the past few weeks so we know each other's style of play very well.