Back to reality for Pinder after World Cup dream
THREE times she had tried, three times she had failed, but luckily for Gillian Pinder this was only practice. Bad practice, to be fair, but a few days later it would somehow make perfect. It was early August, the final week of the Hockey World Cup and the Irish team was preparing for its quarter-final with India. When it came to selecting penalty-takers, well, they at least knew who wasn’t taking one.
“I missed all of mine so that’s why I wasn’t picked,” says Pinder. “They said ‘we better not use you’.”
Ireland came through 3-1 in that shoot-out to set up a semi-final clash with Spain, and when they faced another shoot-out there management decided to give Pinder a shot.
She scored her first one, but when it was all square after five, the chance fell back to Pinder in sudden death to send Ireland through to the final.
Five weeks on, the 26-year-old thinks back to those moments: how coach Graham Shaw asked a cluster of the girls who was taking that pivotal penalty and his reaction when he heard it was Pinder.
Childish
“He kind of went, ‘uh, okay’,” she recalls. “He was probably thinking of the three I’d missed a couple days before.”
As a result, Pinder was struck with a curiously childish thought as she walked forward to face her fate.
“I was thinking of Graham not backing me! I had him in my head, but all I kept thinking during the penalty was try to move (the Spanish goalkeeper) and put it in the goal.”
Had she ever felt nerves like it? “No, never. Even now I feel it in my stomach when I watch it back.”
In situations like that it can be best not to think, and when it comes to penalties Pinder could never be accused of getting too far ahead of herself.
“I never like to plan it because if I do and the keeper does something that blocks my plan you’re in panic mode. I just go, try and move around and hopefully a gap opens.”
It did, and she duly fired past Spanish keeper Maria Ruiz to seal a frankly absurd achievement for Irish hockey, for Irish sport. Sure, the final the next day brought them hurtling back to reality as the Dutch beat them 6-0, but never had runners-up been so buoyant in defeat.
“We were the last ones on the pitch, they were kicking us off,” says Pinder, who admits the impact only hit when she returned home to Dublin.
“We’d all gone off social media and we’d got text messages saying everyone’s talking about the hockey, but we were like, ‘ah, it’s just friends and family’. But when we saw the turnout on Dame Street, that’s when we saw the magnitude of what we’d done – it’s something none of us will ever forget.”
But life goes on, as it must, and in recent days Pinder has returned to training with Pembroke Hockey Club in Ballsbridge ahead of their season opener later this month.
Working life beckons, too, though Pinder is one of the lucky few to turn her obsession into a living, all the better that it’s with her alma mater.
“I took a job at St Andrew’s College and I’m in charge of running the hockey programme,” she says.
Hockey, in one form or another, has long shaped her life. As a teenager she accepted a scholarship to Syracuse University in New York, playing with them in the NCAA Final Four her freshman year. Not long after that the door swung open to the Irish team and, as much as she enjoyed her US adventure, Pinder couldn’t resist.
She’s been a fixture on the Irish team ever since, toiling anonymously with her team-mates for days when many outside the sport’s confines wouldn’t know their names.
She’s seen the metamorphosis of the sport here, from having to fundraise their way to tournaments to the welcome announcement last month that Hockey Ireland will receive an additional €500,000 to assist preparations for the Tokyo Olympics.
“We’re delighted with it,” says Pinder. “At the moment we’re waiting to hear how it will be spent, but we try to keep ourselves as far removed from that as possible to focus on performance.”
She’s also observed a surge in interest at underage level and she hopes that will be replicated with attendance figures when Ireland return to action in friendlies in the coming months.
In 2019 they’ll have one big goal, Olympic qualification, which will likely hinge on a play-off game with an opponent that’s yet to be decided. Get to Tokyo, they’ve learned, and anything could be possible.
“I think we’ve convinced anybody the underdogs can do a bit of damage,” she says. “The only thing that’ll change for us is the expectation on our shoulders, but we’re confident we can take any team on our day.”