Murray: 'After Canada it can be tough to talk about it, how much it hurt the squad'

OLYMPIC QUALIFIERS: The Ireland Men's and Women's hockey teams are both looking to qualify for the Olympics in Paris 2024. Picture: Sportsfile

The expectation is that the team Ireland sends to the Paris Games this summer will be the biggest yet. More athletes again than the 116 they sent to Tokyo for the delayed Olympics in 2021, which in itself, was almost twice the collective gathered for London 2012.

There are a myriad of reasons behind it. Facilities are better, the government is putting more money into sport and the political bickering that marred too much of the sporting landscape has largely subsided. Teams within the team are a factor too.

The men’s hockey side that qualified for Rio in 2016 was the game's first Irish team to make the big dance in 108 years, and the first Irish team in any field sport since 1948. Their female counterparts then made it to Tokyo and were joined by the men’s rugby sevens.

Both the male and female sevens sides have already booked places at the 2024 gig and it isn’t hyperbole to say that the next nine days in Valencia will be the most influential for overall ‘Team Ireland’ numbers than any other before the opening ceremony.

For Irish hockey, the stakes are enormous.

Sean Dancer’s women’s team and Mark Tumilty’s men’s side will both feature in Olympic qualifying tournaments in the Spanish city, starting this weekend, the aim being to reach the knockout stages and claim one of the top three finishing places in their respective tournaments.

Both face stiff tests. Dancer’s side is 13th in the world and finds itself in a pool with Belgium (4th), Korea (12th) and Ukraine (28th). The men, also ranked 13th, face Belgium (2nd), Japan (15th) and Ukraine (29th). The top two from each pool progress to semi-finals.

If there are any guarantees to be found in the course of all this then it might just be in the drama that is expected to unfold because Ireland’s qualifying efforts for the last three Games have been laced liberally with the stuff through wildly different formats.

Neither made it to London 12 years ago with a Korean goal seven seconds from full-time snatching the dream from the men in the form of a 3-2 final qualifier loss. The women came out second best to Belgium at the same stage.

Four years later and the women's side fell agonisingly short with a 4-3 penalty shootout defeat to China and, while the men went all the way that time, they had their own horror show when a last-gasp controversial video call against Canada denied them passage to Japan.

That last one is a scar that still hasn’t healed.

“After Canada it can be tough to talk about it, how much it hurt the squad,” says captain Sean Murray. “The Olympics is the pinnacle for hockey and to come so close, to sacrifice so much and then miss out so narrowly, it has to hurt.

“It takes time to get over it. At the same time, we have never worked so hard. We’ve brought through the next three years of players to get ourselves ready for this tournament and we feel like we are in a good place here now.” 

Players in both Ireland squads speak of the hunger innate in them because, while the female side of the house made the last get-together in Asia, there is an undeniable sense of appetite unabated by that experience back in 2021.

That was a squad that fielded a good sprinkling of the players – ten in all - who had navigated the team to an historic World Cup final against the Netherlands in 2018, but the only match of five won in the Japanese capital was their opener against South Africa.

Player after player walked through the Oi Stadium mixed zone in tears after the last of those four losses, to Great Britain. Hannah McLoughlin was there that day, and has the Olympic tattoo to go with it, but she is one of those desperate to return and go better again.

Bittersweet, she calls the whole experience.

“A lot of us held a lot of disappointment in how we performed in some of the games over there. We didn’t get out of our pool and we believed we had the ability to do that. Coming home from Tokyo, Paris was already in a lot of people’s minds.

“Tokyo wasn’t enough. I want to compete with the best in the world and come out on top. I want to get out of the pool and have a chance of a medal game in an Olympic Games. So that disappointment has really pushed us on.” 

If defeat can be a motivator then so can success.

McLoughlin was just an 18-year still on the fringes of the squad when she sat in the Donnybrook stands with her parents Anne and Alan in November of 2019 when the women’s team secured that berth in Tokyo in maybe the most dramatic qualifier of them all.

Two legs against Canada both ended goalless but the image of a Donnybrook stadium carpeted in blue and pelted by rain was etched in the nation’s mind when the home team edged a nail-biting penalty shootout in a packed venue.

Katie Mullan, captain in recent years, and one of just three in the current squad who experienced the pain of that shootout win against China in 2015, knows all too well what a similar end result in Spain would do for the team and for the sport here at home.

“It’s a very fond memory. After the success of the 2018 World Cup, to have something so big and so close on the back of that, and on home soil, was so special, and I have very vivid memories with the kids there on the pitch after that game.

“For a lot of us in the squad now we wouldn’t have had an experience like that as youngsters, being able to have the opportunity to watch the senior team in such a big competition, but we’ll take a bit less rainfall the next couple of weeks.”