GB men's captain Adam Dixon was left with an overriding sense of relief after helping put his team on the plane to Tokyo 2020.
His side won their two games 4-1 and 5-2, and the result was never truly in doubt once they overcame an early 1-0 deficit in the first match.
Dixon said, "I’m not going to lie, it’s a massive sense of relief. There
was a lot of pressure on these two games. We knew that pressure and nerves would come into it, so we tried
to tackle it head on and channel it. Nerves are only a human emotion, we took
it on the chin and put two good performances in this weekend. To wrap it up
with a ticket to Tokyo makes it even sweeter.
"We got off to a flyer but I never really felt totally
confident until Aldo scored that final penalty stroke with four minutes to go,
only then did I think that we’d got it in the bag!
"Malaysia kept on
coming and we knew that would be the case. I think we dug deep defensively, we just had to make sure we
didn’t make any silly errors and in large parts that’s exactly what we did.
"Scoring nine goals is the icing on the cake. We’re lucky that we do have
some real talent in that forward line with an eye for goal, so we just play to
our strengths, that’s certainly a massive part of it but it’s been a great team
effort this weekend.
"Now I’m really excited about what's ahead. There’s still loads of hard work to do
to catch up with the top teams in the world but after a little break now we’ll
regroup and will be back to business looking forward to the FIH Pro League
again.
"We need to make sure that winning becomes a bit of a habit, I want this
team to enjoy moments like this, winning games off the back of good team
performances and if we can build momentum like this over the next eight months
then that would be really good."