KEY POINTS:
There is plenty riding on Sunday's return clash between Kevin Towns' Black Sticks and the Australian women's hockey team in the Oceania Olympic qualifiers in Buderim on Australia's Sunshine Coast.
Beaten 1-0 on Wednesday by the world's third-ranked team, Towns took some heart from the game and remains confident the team can turn that result around in the tournament final.
"I was a bit disappointed we could not retain quite the same intensity in the latter stages of that game," said Towns. "We changed to a 2-4-4 formation which was different but I'm not sure why we dropped our intensity. We had the better of the game for a long period and won a couple of penalty corners in that time but couldn't convert.
"It was disappointing in the end to lose to a messy goal."
But, from a positive point of view, Towns said the result and the performance showed the team is competitive and that should be enough to convince the New Zealand Olympic Committee they should be given the tick of approval to line-up at next year's Beijing Olympics. Now his sights are set on the return and the opportunity to get the team up from their ranking of 11 to seven and see Australia drop to fourth.
The Black Sticks play Fiji today - a game Towns sees as the chance to give some of his players valuable game time.
In the last of the round-robin games, the New Zealand and Australian men square off tonight (10.30pm NZT), before their rematch on Sunday which will hand the winner a direct ticket to the Olympics.
The Black Sticks warmed up with a world record 39-0 romp over Papua New Guinea led by Simon Child's 11-goal haul. Phil Burrows got eight, Hayden Shaw seven while Jan Peterson and Dave Kosoof bagged hat-tricks.
