‘We went to Saracens training ground and all they wanted to talk about was us’
Britain’s hockey heroes reunite aiming to build on success that captured the nation’s imagination
Susannah Townsend remembers precisely when the scale of what she and her hockey team-mates achieved at the Rio Olympics became clear. It was in January, when the Great Britain midfielder had taken her gold medal to show a friend at the Saracens training ground.
“They’d just beaten Toulon, they were flying,” she recalls of the European champions. “But all they wanted to talk about was the Olympics. They’d all watched our match. And Owen Farrell wanted a selfie with my medal. He’s the best there is at his sport, he’s played in front of 90,000 and he has that much respect for what we did. Stuff like that makes you think: wow.”
Farrell will be preoccupied with Lions business this weekend, which means he will miss out on the opportunity to watch Townsend and her colleagues in action on home Astroturf for the first time since their Rio triumph. The three-nation Investec Series at the Olympic Park begins today with England facing Argentina; tomorrow, the hosts take on Holland in a rerun of the nerveshredding Olympic final that culminated in a penalty shoot-out that, in a move unprecedented for a hockey match, postponed the BBC News at Ten.
Given that all of the British side who beat the Dutch qualify for England, the badge on the shirt is incidental: the Dutch have said they are out for revenge. But Townsend is not fazed. “It’s a sell-out, it’s going to be noisy. I reckon Holland will be scared coming to play us on our home turf.”
Townsend has just completed a training session at Bisham Abbey when, with team-mates Giselle Ansley and Nicola White, she sits down with The Daily Telegraph to swap memories of last August. And their insights into how their victory was achieved are fascinating.
“We’d taken a collective decision to go off social media immediately after the opening ceremony,” says Ansley, who will miss the weekend fixtures after being hit in the face by a ball in training. She will undergo surgery on the injury today. “We had no distractions, we had absolutely no idea what was going on back home. It was total focus.” It was that focus, they say, that propelled them from embarrassment to glory. In 2014, as England, they had finished second last in the World Cup. And that was the moment they properly started on the road to gold.
“We thought we were going to medal,” Townsend says. “Coming 11th out of 12, it forced us to address some things. We had some hard conversations. We came up with a set of values that we could live by whatever the setback. It’s probably what made us successful.”
What changed for them was finding a way to deliver. One of the things they introduced came to be known as Thinking Thursday, a tough training session in which they were set match-specific challenges. “It’s designed to prepare you for moments,” explains Townsend. “Danny [Kerry, the GB and England head coach] will say: ‘Right you’re 2-1 down, there’s two minutes to go, what are you going to do?’
And we do it. It just seems like real fun at the time. But when you get to an Olympic final you realise we’ve practised every scenario there is.” And practice, they say, makes perfect.
“When Holly [Webb] stood up to take that final penalty all she needed to do was imagine being back at Bisham,” says Ansley. “She’d done it a million times in training and just went through her normal processes. The beauty of being able to train here day in, day out, you can recreate this environment wherever you play.” Familiarity became ingrained.
“It meant when we had a huddle we hardly needed to say anything,” says White. “We knew in eye contact what we had to do.”
The training and personal behaviour systems they have in place, the players reckon, are now sufficiently robust that even the retirement of their long-standing captain, Kate Richardson-walsh, who is to be replaced by Alex Danson, will not deflect their aim to retain gold in Tokyo. “We love Kate,” says Townsend. “But what we tried to create was: ‘She’s our captain, but we’ve all got leadership qualities.’ ”
“Before we went out in Rio, it wasn’t just Kate speaking,” White adds. “Every one of us said the one thing we were going to do out there. Mind you, most of us said, ‘Let’s enjoy this’.”
And enjoy it they did. In the aftermath all of them – from Sam Quek in I’m A Celebrity to White making 90 school visits in two months – were in high demand. “We connected on an emotional level as well as a sporting one,” says White. “People want to see the passion, the unity. But most of all they liked us because we delivered when it mattered most.” And this weekend, their pursuit of delivery continues.