England women’s head coach Jason Lee has vowed to get his team firing at the Hockey World Cup as they bid to keep their hopes of reaching the semi-finals alive.
England fell to a second successive defeat in The Hague as they lost 3-0 to China but they more than had the chances to bounce back from an opening loss to the USA.
They are currently fifth in their six-team Group B with South Africa, who have also lost both their fixtures, up next and a win needed if they are to break into the top two.
The two best teams from Groups A and B will advance to the semi-finals in the Netherlands and head coach Lee insists it’s up to him to get England converting their chances.
“The players put their heart and soul into the game. Ultimately it is my job to get them ready to play and take their chances. We’ll be looking at that – how are the chances created and what can we do to help the girls to take them,” he said.
“That’s two games running now that we’ve had three times as many circle entries as the opposition. For 60 circle entries we’ve only scored one goal and for 20 against we’ve conceded five, which makes life very difficult.
“For long periods I felt we just needed to get one goal from the chances we were creating. As the game progressed the nerves among the players grew and of course the result of the first game made them even more tentative. I think if we’d got an early goal we’d have found it quite an easy game.
“The first goal by the Chinese was fantastic, it really was excellent. Then they scored from a corner not long after that and all our confidence was drained. China put up a wall against us and some of their defence was excellent. They took their chances well.”
© Sportsbeat 2014