Lee Morton sat on the blue pitch and did not move for several minutes. Some teammates stood and watched India’s celebrations, stunned, with hands on heads. Others sank to their knees, unable to take it in.
A shootout defeat by India in the quarter-finals means 36 years of hurt will become 40 before Great Britain’s men next have a chance to break their barren Olympic run. But this was surely the most agonising exit of all since that golden moment in Seoul in 1988.
“It’s going to hurt for a long time,” said GB’s Northern Irish captain, David Ames. “If we’re honest with ourselves, we haven’t been as clinical as we want to, or need to be, if we want to be standing on podiums.”
GB came into this tournament full of promise. The mood music was upbeat under the relentlessly positive, Bazball-esque reign of the head coach Paul Revington, the team rising to No 2 in the world. And when India’s Amit Rohidas saw red early in the second quarter, GB held all the cards.
But all of that promise and one‑man advantage met its match in the second half, and then the shootout, when the world’s best keeper Sreejesh Parattu Raveendran lived up to his reputation and ended GB’s Olympic dream.
“It’s what great goalkeepers do,” Ames said. “They stand up when it’s needed. The big moments, they matter, especially when you get to these competitions and these moments in the knockouts.”
For Morton, a 29-year-old Glaswegian half-back enjoying an international renaissance under Revington, this is perhaps the end of the Olympic road. His equaliser before half‑time came after Rohidas had been given a red card for an upraised stick in the face of Will Calnan, only for India’s captain, Harmanpreet Singh, then to confound the narrative by giving India the lead from a penalty corner.
Morton’s role in the side epitomises Revington’s tactically flexible approach. He defends, he attacks, and here he was waiting three metres out to meet Gareth Furlong’s cross and beat Sreejesh for his third goal of the tournament with all the poacher’s instinct of Gary Lineker in his England prime.
That should have been the catalyst for GB to kick on and win the match, but India and Sreejesh had other ideas. The second half was one-way traffic from GB but India’s keeper was seeing the ball like a beachball, fending off everything thrown at him. The only time he was beaten, by a Rupert Shipperley shot, the ball came back off a post.
With five minutes left of a helter‑skelter final quarter, GB broke up field only for Calnan’s fierce strike to be turned away brilliantly by Sreejesh yet again in the save of the tournament. It was GB’s last chance. India’s fans celebrated at full time like they had already won. With Sreejesh their magic card in the shootout, perhaps they already had – and maybe GB knew it, too.
A hockey shootout is a wondrous thing: attacker v keeper, eight seconds on the clock, start on the 23m line, five turns each – go! First up was James Albery, drawing Sreejesh and flicking past him before a Stuart Pearce-like roar to the crowd. Harmanpreet equalised, Zach Wallace scored, Sukhjeet Singh made it 2-2.
Up stepped poor Conor Williamson, who found himself harried away from goal by Sreejesh and fired over the bar in a final act of desperation before the hooter.
Lalit Kumar Upadhyay made it 3-2 before, almost inevitably, Sreejesh saved from Phil Roper. Raj Kumar Pal scored, the GB dream was over, and Morton sank to the floor.
