FIH world rankings: Indian men’s hockey team jumps to fourth spot

and trail Atletico Madrid 1-0 from the first leg of their Champions League last-16 tie.

“We can start again with whatever we did before, and we will,” said Klopp. “We cannot say now we will react in this way or that. We have to show it in the next games.”

Dejan Lovren was one of those blamed by the Liverpool support for a rare defeat as Deeney relished the battle with the Croatian international.

And Lovren is also hoping a “wake-up call” inspires Liverpool in the final stages of the season.

“Maybe it is a wake-up call for us,” he said. “It can be a benefit to help us get to the end of the season.

“We know there is always an end for everything. It is here where our unbeaten run ended. We will not look at this result and think it was a bad season because of losing here. One performance won’t ruin everything, but this is always a learning process.

“The last couple of games hadn’t been the best performances but we won. This one, it didn’t happen. This one was like someone hit us in our faces — and we deserved it.”

LAUSANNE: The Indian men’s hockey team has climbed a rung to the fourth position, their highest since the inception of the FIH world rankings in 2003, in the recently released chart.

India’s excellent form in the first three rounds of the second edition of FIH Hockey Pro League has seen them move from fifth to fourth position.

India’s rise comes at the expense of Olympic champions Argentina, who dropped to fifth place.

World champions Belgium who in January defeated Australia in Sydney to wrestle top spot from their opponents remain in pole position, with the Kookaburras (2nd) and the Netherlands (3rd) also holding their positions in the top three.

Germany and England remain in sixth and seventh position, while New Zealand, who have earned two wins in their last three FIH Hockey Pro League matches, is static at eighth place after briefly dropping below Spain to ninth last month.

In the women’s list, India occupy the ninth spot. Netherlands is at the top followed by Australia, Argentina, Germany and England.

The new model for calculating the FIH world rankings was introduced on January 1 2020, moving away from the previous tournament-based rankings system to a dynamic, match-based model where opposing teams exchange points in official, FIH sanctioned games.

The number of points exchanged depends on the result of the match, the relative ranking of the teams and the importance of the match.