FIH’s Players of the Year are the Netherlands’ Felice Albers and India’s Harmanpreet Singh

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The FIH has announced that Felice Albers of the Netherlands and Harmanpreet Singh of India are the Women’s and Men’s FIH Players of the Year 2021-22.

Felice Albers’ 22 years on this planet have been packed to the brim with accomplishments and accolades. Albers is a proven winner, having played a significant role in the Dutch national team’s championship runs in the FIH Hockey Pro League (2019 & 2020-21), Euro Hockey Championship (2021), Olympic Games (Tokyo, 2020), and FIH Hockey Women’s World Cup (2022). The FIH Player of the Year Award is another another honor she can add to her shelf.

FIH’s Players of the Year

Albers made her debut with the Dutch national team this year after impressive achievements at the junior level, where she mostly played in the midfield but sometimes occasionally contributed in the attack. Since she first made her way into the senior squad, she has been relied upon heavily in the role of attacking midfielder. She’s scored 16 goals in 32 international games, making her a major danger to the opposition’s goaltending.

Albers was a key cog in the wheel of a phenomenal Dutch team that finished second in the Pro League and won a third consecutive gold medal at the World Cup. The Netherlands scored 42 goals in 16 games during the FIH Hockey Pro League 2021-22, and 17 goals in 6 games during the FIH Hockey Women’s World Cup Spain and Netherlands 2022. Albers’s golden goal was the icing on the cake for the Netherlands’ championship run.

Felice Albers

RESULTS

Player of the Year (women)

In doing so, Albers joins Germany’s Natascha Keller (1999) as the youngest women’s FIH Player of the Year award winners and the youngest winners overall (since the awards’ debut in 1998) to achieve this distinction. In a tight competition for the FIH Hockey Stars Awards 2021-22, Albers finished with 29.1 points, just ahead of Maria Granatto’s 26.9 points. When the final scores were tallied, Agustina Gorzelany came in third with 16.4 points.

To put it simply, Harmanpreet Singh is one of the most famous hockey players of our time. He’s a fantastic defender who always seems to be in the correct spot to disrupt the opposition’s attack. In order to advance the ball up the field from defense, he possesses excellent dribbling ability. And he keeps on scoring goals. He already had an excellent history, but now he has been named the FIH Player of the Year for a record-tying second time.

Harmanpreet’s goal scoring record stands out most prominently among his statistics. His goal-scoring prowess has improved dramatically over the previous year, as several opponents have struggled to defend against his penalty corner drag flicks. In the 2021-22 FIH Hockey Pro League, he has scored an astonishing 18 goals in only 16 games, including two hat tricks. He finished the season as India’s leading scorer and currently owns the record for most goals scored in a single Pro League campaign.

Harmanpreet Singh

At the Hero Asian Champions Trophy Dhaka 2021, Harmanpreet was also in fine form, scoring 8 goals in 6 games and helping India to a bronze medal result. Indian team’s silver medal achievement in the 2022 Commonwealth Games may be attributed in large part to his efforts.

Harmanpreet has won the Player of the Year title (men’s category) for two years in a row, making him just the fourth player in history to do so, alongside Teun De Nooijer (Netherlands), Jamie Dwyer (Australia), and Arthur van Doren (Netherlands) (Belgium). After Harmanpreet’s 29.4 points, Thierry Brinkmann scored 23.6 and Tom Boon scored 23.4.

Player of the Year (men)