Fiona Felber is a member of the Austrian women’s national indoor team that will be participating at the FIH Indoor Hockey World Cup in Liège, Belgium, in February.
We caught up with Felber to hear about her team’s preparations for an intense indoor season of club hockey and, of course, the World Cup.
This will be Austria’s fifth appearance at the event. They missed the 2018 edition but had been part of all previous editions. The team’s best performance had been a fourth-place finish in 2015, when they lost on penalty shoot-out to the Czech Republic in the bronze medal match. Currently, Austria is ranked eighth in the FIH Indoor Hockey World Rankings.
In Liège, Austria will be competing in Pool B along with Belarus, Namibia, Netherlands, South Africa and the host nation Belgium.
One thing that Felber is really looking forward to is the chance to play against teams from other parts of the world. Most of her indoor experience as both a junior and senior international has been on the European circuit, so she is looking forward to the challenge.
‘I cannot tell you what we are expecting from these other nations, but we will be as prepared as we can be. It will be interesting to see what their style of play is and how we will compare.’
talking about her own expectations of the event, Felber said: ‘I will certainly be nervous as I step out on the pitch but I will try to keep things under control.
‘The bond in our team is a very good one. We have worked hard and improved, especially physically, so I think ‘togetherness’ will be one of our strengths.’
Austria begins their campaign at the FIH Indoor Hockey World Cup Liège 2022 with a match against Namibia. The African team are ranked one place below Austria in the FIH World Rankings so the match should be highly competitive. The competition runs from 2-6 February.
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