Hockey resumes after burst water pipe floods field + VIDEO

The Black Sticks Women's opening match against Japan resumed this evening, an hour after a water main burst near the entrance to the Unison Hockey Stadium in Hastings.

The hosts were trailing 1-0 when the game came to a flooding halt about 6.37pm at the Hastings City end of the international turf at the Hawke's Bay Regional Park.

Oblivious to the commotion, the players carried on with the game, until a Black Sticks player and Japanese counterpart chased a runway pass to the offending corner to realise the ball had rolled into ankle deep water encroaching the arena like a rising tide.

They turned around, looking perplexed, before the stadium announcer brought the flooding to the attention of the match officials on the park.

An army of stadium staff and volunteers waded through the water that had snaked its way to the rear entrance of the stadium, forming a murky moat.

The workers strategically planted wooden crate-like makeshift bridges to enable fans to walk over it to dry land on the other side of the enclosure.

The fire department arrived as officers armed with super hoses soaked up water before squirting it on to the adjacent lawn in front of the Hawke's Bay Netball courts.

"It appears as if the water main is in control," said the stadium announcer Adam Green at 7.05pm as the players from both sides started warming up again.

Signs were the game was going to resume although floodlights needed to be switched on as darkness crept in pretty quickly.

The Land of the Rising Sun drew first blood in the ninth minute - the second of penalty-corner attempts after Marina Yagi had missed the first attempt - from striker Motomi Kawamura who raised her stick in triumph after emerging from a scrum as Kiwi new signing goalkeeper Grace O'Hanlon couldn't prevent the prod from a scrambling defence despite lying across the face of the goalmouth.

The visitors, rebuilding after Rio Olympics like all teams, fell back on defence soon after to thwart a wave of Kiwi attacks amid some spirit-lifting cheering from their dugout.

They then became the architects of a well thought out counterattack, typical of Asian countries, to yield another penalty corner but couldn't convert.

Like the Hockeyroos earlier, coach Mark Hager's women seemed content to go through the motions as the Japanese showed more assertiveness in the engine room.