It’s been seven years since Ireland played in the World Cup final against the Netherlands. Heady days. Nobody saw it coming. But when it did, Ireland’s success grabbed the country.
The World Cup venue adjacent to the Olympic Stadium on the east side of London was taken over as sunshine melted the roads around Canning Town and Stratford. Irish hockey had never seen anything like it.
The current Irish captain Sarah Hawkshaw, a good friend of the 2018 captain Katie Mullan, who remains in the current squad with another World Cup medal winner, Róisín Upton, tells the story Mullan told her of knocking down stereotypes, lancing perceptions.
“In terms of the World Cup we would speak a bit of how as a team they were able to get themselves in a position that they were so motivated to succeed,” says Hawkshaw.
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“Even the funny stories, where they had to check into the room every day because people would write them off and they’d keep winning and they’d keep having to check in again the next day because they were due to leave.”
It’s a greatly changed group of players now but looking towards the 2025 European Championships next week in Mönchengladbach, if there is one thing the squad understands it is believing that they are as good as they want to be. They do not create limitations based on other people’s perceptions.
Hawkshaw has been team captain since December of last year and is a veteran of the 2023 Euros and the Tokyo Olympic Games. Ireland agonisingly fell just short of qualifying for Paris when they were beaten by Great Britain in January 2024 at the qualifiers in Valencia.
“Personally it was very, very hard for a while to retain motivation, to get going again,” says Hawkshaw of that defeat.
“Attaching your motivation to a new goal can be hard, when you have almost given everything for the last goal, that you didn’t achieve. It took time to process that, but I found I must be happy in my life to be able to perform in my sport. That became a big focus for me.”
But Tokyo 2020 was a game changer, too, in that it was the first time an Irish women’s hockey team had qualified for an Olympic Games. Sarah Torrans, Hannah McLoughlin and Sarah McAuley, who are travelling to Germany, were also part of the Olympic squad.
Aside from the transition in players, the management has changed too. Since 2018, World Cup coach Graham Shaw has left. Sean Dancer joined as head coach in May 2019, having moved from his role as assistant coach in New Zealand, and took the team to the Olympics, a World Cup and to fifth in Europe, equalling the team’s best result.
The current coach, Gareth Grundie, was appointed last October.
“I think a lot of change has happened in the last year that’s been good for the squad,” says Hawkshaw. “Gareth has come in and he has challenged a lot of the ways that we play and the standards we set. But he was with us in the lead-up to Tokyo under Sean Dancer so we have that understanding of the hockey he brings.
“A lot of our players have also played in the European Leagues for the past three years and that changes things a lot. Hockey is quite a small world when you get outside of Ireland and play. That dynamic has brought up the standard and brought up the level of expectations we have of each other and ourselves as a country.”
But for her school, Mount Sackville in Dublin, Hawkshaw may never have played hockey. As a child she joined local GAA club St Brigid’s and began playing football. Good enough to play underage and minors for Dublin, she was in secondary school before a hockey stick was ever put in her hand.
She was also a competitive cross-country athlete, who ran for her school and with Clonliffe Harriers.
Her brother David, who played rugby with Leinster and is now with Connacht, was also a talented St Brigid’s hurler. Hewon a Leinster minor hurling championship with Dublin in 2016 and played in an All-Ireland minor semi-final against Limerick at Croke Park.
A sports scholarship took Hawkshaw to the University of Massachusetts, where she played collegiate hockey for four years, making her Ireland debut against Chile in 2019.
“Through the years of football, under-16s, minor, I still remember those days as amazing, what team culture can be and how you can be part of something that is bigger than yourself and you can carry that through life,” she says.
“Something I always had was good fitness. I used to run quite competitively, so I was put on [in GAA] just to run after somebody, so that worked in my favour. I was midfield. I was probably a player who valued feeling connected to the players around me to be able to perform.
“I didn’t know what hockey was until I went to Mount Sackville. We were all in Brigid’s from the mini-leagues up. I absolutely loved it. Then the natural transition was when you go to Mount Sackville and pick up a hockey stick. That was it. The exciting new thing you do at the time.
“I remember the first time I was trying to play hockey out on the road, ripping up the bottom of our sticks because we’d just bought them. We were playing camogie, didn’t know what we were doing.”
In Mönchengladbach, Ireland have been handed a tough draw for the pool games. The Netherlands, the number one ranked team in the world, are first up, then France, who are six places below Ireland’s ranking of 11th, and finally the sixth-ranked home side Germany.
A goal would be a semi-final as the top three teams qualify for the next World Cup, which take place in Belgium and the Netherlands in 2026.
“I don’t mind putting goals to these tournaments,” says Hawkshaw. “I think we have a tough group. I don’t know how it is every single time in a major we draw Holland for the first game. But it’s an unbelievable fixture to get.
“So we have Holland, Germany and France. France, we’d expect ourselves to be up to beat them. Germany is going to be a challenge, but we are targeting that game as one we can win. We get out if we do that and we can put ourselves in a semi-final spot.
“So, 100 per cent we are looking to push that finish [fifth] one or two steps farther. We know there is World Cup qualification that comes out of this as well. It’s looking like it will have to be top three for us to qualify with another tournament next year if we don’t get it from the Europeans.”
Women’s Eurohockey Championship schedule (all times Irish, all games live on RTÉ)
Saturday, August 9th: Ireland v The Netherlands, 2.30pm; Monday, August 11th: Ireland v France, 2.45pm; Wednesday, August 13th: Ireland v Germany, 7pm; Friday, August 15th: Crossover match 1; Sunday, August 17th: Crossover match 2.
Ireland squad: Elizabeth Murphy, Holly Micklem, Ellen Curran, Katie Larmour, Sarah McAuley, Hannah McLoughlin, Caoimhe Perdue, Róisín Upton, Charlotte Beggs, Michelle Carey, Christina Hamill, Sarah Hawkshaw (capt), Emily Kealy, Katie McKee, Niamh Carey, Katie Mullan, Mikayla Power, Sarah Torrans.
