HOCKEY - Just pass mark for NZ

BLACK Sticks captain Ryan Archibald is quietly confident the 2008 season will start as brightly as last season left off, with a winning performance against Chile at ITM Stadium last night.
Archibald, a veteran of more than 190 games for his country at only 27 years of age, said a drawn test series against Australia, the world's No 1 side in November, shows just how good the squad can be.
"It shows that we're playing well and we'd certainly have plenty of confidence that we could do the same again, if not better, at the Olympics - but the first thing we've got to do is make sure we get there," he said.
Qualification for Beijing this year is all the more important for Archibald, after some shocking luck caused him to miss out on the Athens Olympics - he broke his leg two months before the tournament started.
"At this stage playing at the Olympics is the one main goal I've got left [in hockey], so this year is all about knocking that one off," he said.
The Black Sticks' current four-match series against Chile is followed by a four-match series against Japan before they line up in their vital Olympic qualifying series starting on February 2 at North Harbour.
"Argentina are our No 1 threat. They're a strong hockey side and both of us probably deserve to go to the Olympics, but unfortunately one of us will miss out," he said.
Argentina are the top seeds in the Albany tournament, with a world ranking three places above the 10th-ranked Kiwis.
Archibald believes 15th-ranked France and 19th-ranked Ireland will be out to prove a point in Albany, while the United States and Trinidad and Tobago are unlikely to give the Black Sticks any problems.
The Black Sticks play the second of their matches against Chile tomorrow at 2.30pm, with the third and final Whangarei match at the same time on Sunday, before the series ends early next week in Pukekohe.
Realistically, Chile are not considered a big threat but they are a unknown quantity, so the Kiwis don't plan to give them an easy time of it, hoping to quickly regain the form that saw them record their best-ever result in a test series in Australia.
"There's no doubt that [series] was a really big confidence booster for us. A number of regular players were unavailable through injury, but it was great to still compete so well even though we were understrength. In the end it was disappointing not to win the series.
"That was certainly valuable in terms of confidence for the squad, especially for the fringe players who got some unexpected game time ... and now the guys are all pretty excited to get back into some test match hockey after working hard over the last couple of months."
* Need to fine tune bottom end skills
BLACK Sticks coach Shane McLeod grudgingly handed out a pass mark to his team after flogging an understrength, jet-lagged Chilean side 6-0 at Whangarei's ITM Rosvall Stadium last night.
"It was the first game back for us for a while so we were relatively happy about many aspects of the game but there were still a lot of things that we've got to tighten up - and against a stronger side, I think we might have been punished for them," he said.
There were a few signs that the Black Sticks were still in holiday mode with passes going wayward or being poorly controlled, occasionally offering the visitors the opportunity of scoring on the break - opportunities they rarely managed to create for themselves in a largely one-sided game.
The bright side for McLeod was the performance of his forwards, whose speed and skill seemed to paralyse the Chilean defenders.
"Some of the bottom end skill stuff which saw balls going over the sidelines and so on, wasn't acceptable but the finesse that some of the forwards showed was close to where we want it to be," he said.
Simon Child was in top form and immediately made an impact off the bench scoring the second Black Sticks goal with his first touch of the ball in the 11th minute after Phillip Burrows - another outstanding performer - had scored the first, just a minute earlier.
Child scored the third to make it 3-0 at the break before two goals in the opening two minutes of the second spell finished the game off. Gareth Brooks started the rot with his first goal with Burrows scoring his second while the Chileans were still trying to regroup.
Brooks finished off the scoring with 10 minutes to go but there could, and probably should have been more goals to reward the Black Sticks for all their possession but for some game Chilean defending and some rustiness in the home camp.
The Chilean's second half performance was probably all they could have expected after their tight schedule before the match. They only had two substitutes on the bench, with the rest of the squad due to arrive on Sunday.
After enduring a 13-hour flight which saw them arrive in Auckland just seven hours before the game, there was good reason for the team to wilt visibly in the second spell.
Chilean coach Franco Nicola promised they would be better prepared for the remaining games of the series.
``It didn't matter we were beaten today, for us, we always prefer to play a match rather than training for a day,' he said.
Nicola said it was the first step of their preparation for their Olympic qualifier in March.