When the head rules the heart...

Knee problems forced Ireland’s most capped hockey player out of the international game, but Eimear Cregan told Alan Good the future of the sport is bright.

DURING the Saracens media day at St Albans before their Heineken Cup semi-final duel with Munster back in 2008, Richard Hill’s sizeable frame came into view amid a jarring contrast.

Here was a literal and metaphorical giant of world rugby, in the twilight of his career, afflicted with a permanent limp — the result of nine knee operations, including two reconstructions — yet he couldn’t have been hungrier to tear into Munster.