The stars have aligned quite well for the Canadian Women’s Field Hockey team as they prepare to open the World League Semifinals in Valencia, Spain this week.
When the Canadian women continue their quest for Olympic qualification Wednesday against China, they will be doing so after a successful spell of hockey over the last half-year.
Most recently, Canada, ranked twentieth in the world, is coming off a test series with world no. 14 Ireland in which they won twice, including the last match of the tournament 3-2.
The recent split with Ireland at the new Pan Am Fields in Toronto, Ontario, comes after a second place finish at World League Round 2 in Dublin, Ireland, where Canada was narrowly defeated by the home side in a penalty shootout in the tournament final.
Combine the competitions with Ireland with Canada’s dominant performance at World League Round 1 in Mexico last September and there hasn’t been much to complain about in recent memory.
“I think there’s definitely more confidence. We were so close to winning World League 2,” says Canadian defender Karli Johansen, who scored twice in the matches in Toronto in May. “We all knew that it was within reach and that we maybe could have done it on another day. Even though that was a month or two ago, we still have that momentum coming into this tournament.”
Confidence is a funny thing. It can often act as a detriment to top teams when treated as a right of passage, but it can also serve as a boon to help lower ranked teams play up to the level of their opponents.
For the Canadian women, it seems to be the latter which is at play, having proven their worth against the higher ranked Irish in recent competition, and scoring draws with the likes of England (world no. 8) last summer and the United States (world no. 5) in a World League Semifinals tune-up match played over the weekend in Spain.
This is all to say that the Canadians are in a good spot heading into the tournament in Valencia, where they look to finish in the top three and qualify for the 2016 Olympic Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
‘We’ll be playing a lot of teams that will be pretty different from Ireland (who are also competing in Spain),” adds Johansen. “They’ll have a lot of different playing styles. For us it was really good to get the basics down and playing our game.”
And if confidence isn’t the x-factor for the Women’s National Team at the World League Semifinals, it will be that Canadian-focused approach that could be.
“Focusing on our team, not really so much the opposition, we definitely get what we need,” says Johansen.
With five or their nine opponents ranked in the top ten in the world, Canada would be remiss not to acknowledge the ability of their competition. But focusing on what they are able to do has been a recipe for recent success and will likely continue to be the case if the are to qualify for Rio through World League.
Click here for Canada’s full World League Semifinals schedule and results.
