Hockey: NZ end tournament in victory

By TERRY MADDAFORD

A fighting second half comeback in 40C-plus temperatures earned the New Zealand men a deserved 3-2 win over the worlds fourth-ranked nation South Korea and third place at the Sultan Azlan Shah tournament in Ipoh, Malaysia tonight.

Down 2-1 at halftime, New Zealand scored two second half goals to score their second win over the Koreans at the tournament.

New Zealand took the lead after seven minutes with a penalty stroke.

In converting the stroke, Hayden Shaw continued his remarkable record of having scored in his last 12 games for New Zealand.

Identical penalty corners from the Koreans in the eighth and 17th minutes shot them to a 2-1 lead which they held until halftime.

Eight minutes into the second half Phil Burrows scored the equaliser when Blair Hopping fired a great cross across the face of the goal and Burrows met it with a great reverse stick shot.

The winner came in the 61st minute when Bevan Hari scored from a well-worked penalty corner variation.

"It was a superb second half effort," said coach Kevin Towns. "You might have said we down and out at halftime. We were struggling. We had run poorly whereas the Koreans had been very measured."

Towns singled goalkeeper Paul Woolford out for a terrific game. Woolford played every minute of every game at the tournament whereas the outfield players were constantly rotated because of the oppressive heat.

It was a great result for New Zealand who were beaten 6-1 by Pakistan in their opening game but bounced back to beat Malaysia and Korea before losing to the Germans.

In their last round-robin game, New Zealand went down to world champions Germany 3-2 after Germany had scored two unanswered goals in the first 14 minutes.

In a game Towns described as "brutal" with the Germans "playing outside the rules," New Zealand fought back to 2-1 before halftime and 2-2 just after the break.

Shaw scored from a stroke after a penalty corner had been blocked by a foot on the goal-line and Wayne McIndoe with a well-struck shot from the edge of the circle.

The Germans scrambled the winner nine minutes from time.