Irish women’s hockey on the brink of Rio qualification

If momentum means anything the Irish women’s team have the best opportunity in the sport’s history to make history. Not since 1948 has an Irish team sport qualified for the Olympic Games and today Rio 2016 is but a game away. Ireland has never qualified for an Olympics in men’s or women’s hockey.

Momentum, because this Irish side has stubbornly faced up to a sequence of matches where two of the teams they beat in pool matches – USA (5) and South Africa (11) – carried a significantly higher world ranking.

Unsettled

An almost catastrophic and yellow-card-ridden performance against Uruguay unsettled the boat, but Ireland’s opponents today, China, will go into the quarter-final match of this Olympic Games qualifier knowing how Irish ferocity and determination have been able to overcome all but the Germans so far.

China is, once more, the higher ranked side at seven in the world to Ireland’s 14. But they have lost three of their four games in Spain and fell in their last match to 15th- ranked Spain.

For Ireland it is a match that could be transformative for a sport that has a large base of women players but attracts little attention.

It has been a goal for the Irish Hockey Association and a hope of the Olympic Council of Ireland for many years to qualify an Irish team sport for an Olympics, and while hockey has been seen as the sport with that potential, assembling a squad of 18 players to reach Olympic standard has been a stumbling block.

Boycott

Irish teams have competed in past Games, but it was not until modern times that countries actually had to qualify. As recently as the 1980s, invitations to compete in Olympics were issued and in 1980 Ireland controversially turned down the chance to compete following a world boycott of the Moscow Games.

Clearly form means little and Irish coach Darren Smith has already spoken of momentum. Based on the plucky way the team has performed over the past week, that maybe critical.

Ireland had lost three times to the higher ranked USA in the past month in warm-up games, but came out of their last pool game as 2-0 winners.

For now a win would do, which would put Ireland in the top four in the competition. Only the top three are ensured of qualification. But fourth- and even fifth- and sixth- placed teams could make it depending on how other continental tournaments such as the Pan-Am games fall.

One more win and the feeling is Rio is in Ireland’s grasp.