Hockey: Draw favours Black Sticks to keep their cool in heat

The Malaysian heat, and the subsequent scheduling of matches at the Sultan Azlan Shah tournament, may be in New Zealand's favour for tomorrow's tournament opener.

Pitted against Argentina with an 8.30am (local time) hit-off, Black Sticks' coach Kevin Towns feels the early start could help his team.

"Maybe we can cash in on their Latin-American ways and catch them out," said Towns as he and his players returned from a morning training session yesterday.

"The times the games are being played at reflect the severity of the temperatures here."

New Zealand play their remaining pool matches, against Pakistan (Tuesday) and the Netherlands (Thursday), at 5pm (local time), thus avoiding the feared 3pm slot.

"By the time we finished training this morning it was over 30 degrees," said Towns. " That was still 10 degrees cooler than when we played India in a warm-up two days ago."

New Zealand lost that game 3-2, but bounced back a day later to edge Malaysia by the same score after leading 3-1 - "and looking like it should have gone to 5-1", said Towns.

"Against India we turned the ball over too much and gave them two goals. We have been working hard at retaining possession. We would like to win that 60 per cent-40 per cent, but we haven't been near that.

"With [new assistant coach] Shane McLeod now working with the midfield attack, we have been working on a strategy of holding the ball as much as we can, setting our attack, going forward, having a couple of probes and then going again.

"You try to score or at least force a corner, but the players also have to be aware that if the ball is turned over it comes back at you, and if there are big gaps you can be caught."

Towns said his team looked much better in their second warm-up game, and were looking to take that a step further against India in their final hit-out last night.

Wellington defender Scott Falconer gets his first start at this level tomorrow as fullback.

The Lineup

Black Sticks to play Argentina, tomorrow 12.30pm (NZ time):
Paul Woolford, Hayden Shaw, Scott Falconer, Shea McAleese, Blair Hopping, Brad Shaw, Ryan Archibald, Mitesh Patel, Gareth Brooks, Simon Child, Lloyd Stephenson. Substitutes: Kyle Pontifex, Dean Couzins, Hugh Copland, Ben Collier, Bevan Hari.