South Asian Games - India Wins Gold In Women's Hockey

Bringing ‘Chak De’ moment into real life, the Indian women’s team won the gold medal in hockey at the 12th South Asian Games on Thursday, 11th February.

With a jaw dropping 10-0 win over Sri Lanka, the home team brought glory as Rani Rampal became the hero of the match after she struck 4 goals for India. India scored 6 goals without a reply in the first half with the Rani opening the scoring in the 2nd minute of the match. Rani scored another at the end of the sequence (31st minute) as Sushila Pukhrambam (4th minute), Preeti Dubey (8th minute), Soudarya Yendala (23rd minute) and Punam Barla (29th minute, which was a penalty corner) scored the remaining 4 in between.

After the blowout in the first session, the home girls appeared to relax their grip in the second half, but were still ahead because of Sri Lanka’s poor defense strategy. The host scored 4 more, 3 of which came through penalty corner conversions. Captain Ritu Rani converted a penalty corner in the 45th minute to make it 7-0 before Rani struck successively, with a field goal in the 58th minute and converting a penalty corner in the 64th minute to enhance her individual tally to 4 in the match and make it 9-0 for the host. Jaspreet Kaur rounded off the table, converting the 11th penalty corner coming India’s way in the 69th minute. And that was it! The decision was made.

India now has 241 medals, including 124 gold medals and is at number 1 position in the rankings. Looking at the cumulative medal tally of all the countries for all the South Asian Games so far, India just won its 1000^th gold medal, a record in the history of the game – the highest number of any of the three medals won by any country in all of the South Asian Games.