Ireland's Olympic hockey qualification one year on: 'It feels like only yesterday'

"The people you normally need to lean on, you couldn’t be with them. That made it even more difficult," says Katie Mullan

Katie Mullan is happy simply to take the reassurances and skip the fear of missing out on the Tokyo Olympics.

Exactly a year since that electrifying night in Donnybrook’s Energia Park, Katie Mullan was probably expecting to be basking in the afterglow of a maiden Irish women’s Olympic hockey campaign.

Instead, a global pandemic means those Tokyo qualifiers remain fresh in the memory. Two drenched contests in the repurposed rugby stadium drew record crowds of over 6,000 each time, enduring the conditions and two emotionally agonising scoreless battles before Canada were eventually defeated in a sudden death shootout.