Irish Rugby Sevens skipper Lucy Mulhall a woman of sporting substance

It was last May that Lucy Mulhall was our pick for sportswoman of the month when she captained the Irish Rugby Sevens team to their first Olympic qualification. The Wicklow native had, though, a reasonable enough excuse for missing the awards’ event come December. She had, after all, only got married the day before.

But when you look at her schedule since then, you wonder how much she and Michael Rock have actually seen of each other. “But that’s what people keep saying to us, it’s the key to a happy marriage,” she chuckles, in an absence-makes-the-heart-grow-fonder kind of way.

The wedding date had to be chosen with military-like precision. Between Mulhall captaining the Sevens, and squeezing in playing Gaelic football for her beloved Tinahely, and so many of the couple’s friends tied up with rugby and GAA duties, the window was suffocatingly tight.

Michael will head to Vancouver and LA ‘so that he can actually see me a little bit’, as will Amee-Leigh Murphy Crowe’s fiance Neil so that he can reacquaint himself with his beloved

The mission was accomplished, though, and the pair got to spend a few days in London around new year. But with the Australian leg of the World Series coming up, a full-scale honeymoon had to be put on the back burner.

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And the schedule only intensifies from here on. There are World Series tournaments in Vancouver (February 23rd-25th), Los Angeles (March 1st-3rd), Hong Kong (April 5th-7th), Singapore (May 3rd-5th) and Madrid (May 21st-June 2nd), before that Olympic campaign in the last week of July.

Michael will head to Vancouver and LA “so that he can actually see me a little bit”, as will Amee-Leigh Murphy Crowe’s fiance Neil so that he can reacquaint himself with his beloved. That’s the price of coupling up with a member of the Irish Sevens squad.

Mulhall, heading for a decade of captaining the team, has paid her price too, in the shape of an oft-broken heart. When they narrowly missed out on qualifying for the Rio and Tokyo Olympics, she thought it just wasn’t meant to be. Then came Toulouse last May and she was in dreamland.

“Olympic qualification felt so close but so far away, until you achieve it, it seems like a dream you’ll never fulfil. But when we did achieve it in Toulouse, ah look, it’s a feeling I could never describe. The emotions were all over the place, I’ll never forget it for as long as I live. All I could think of were people like Louise Galvin and Claire Keohane who I grew up playing with, players who gave so much but were unlucky enough to have come too early to have been part of this when they deserved to be. They’re the reason we are where we’re at now, women like that who paved the way.”

There were years when we just were struggling to come 11th, 10th, 9th, the best we could hope for was eking out a place in the quarter-finals

—  Lucy Mulhall

With Olympic qualification in the bag, the team added another chapter to their history-making exploits last month when they won gold in the Perth leg of the World Series, beating hosts Australia in the final.

“There were years when we just were struggling to come 11th, 10th, 9th, the best we could hope for was eking out a place in the quarter-finals. Sometimes you’d be back in your hotel room because your tournament ended early, you’d be idolising the players in the final, wondering if one day we’d ever get there too. So to reach the final in Perth, and then to actually beat Australia, it was surreal. But so much of it was down to the likes of Béibhinn Parsons and Erin King, younger players who don’t have that history of constantly getting hammered by them, who see no reason why we can’t beat them. That’s the confidence of youth, which these players have brought into the squad, for them the sky’s the limit.”

With that success in Perth comes, needless to say, raised expectations ahead of the team’s Olympic debut, but Mulhall is good with that.

“I don’t think we rely on external expectations because for many years no one had any expectations of us. We were always just driven by our own expectations, our own standards. A few years back, we’d have bitten your hand off just to qualify for the Olympics, but our goals are so much bigger now. We want to go there and have a massive impact and help turn the tide for women’s rugby in Ireland.

“I wouldn’t see that as being a massive pressure going into it, I just think it’s exciting. No one wants to go to an Olympic Games and just be like a visitor, walking around with your accreditation and staring at everyone else. We want to go and win a medal.

“I remember back in the day seeing what Katie Taylor was able to achieve. Seeing someone paving a way that had never been paved before and thinking, ‘God, one day I’d love to do that for my own sport’. And then seeing the soccer team at the World Cup last summer and how the nation got behind them, it was just so uplifting. I hope they’ll get behind us in the same way, that we can have the same impact as those girls did, that at the end of it all we’ll have young girls falling in love with our sport.”

Well, luckily enough the Wicklow club championship doesn’t start until August, so we’ll see if I can get back for a few games with Tinahely

—  Lucy Mulhall

For now, with a schedule of that intensity, Mulhall has had to press pause on her Gaelic football outings, the sport that gave her one of her proudest days: October 2011. The All-Ireland Junior final at Croke Park. Wicklow 2-10, New York 0-08. As RTÉ reported back then: “For a spell in the second half, New York looked on course for a revival but their hopes were dashed five minutes from the hooter when Lucy Mulhall scored a quite sensational second goal for Wicklow.”

But you’ll take a rest after the Olympics?

“Well, luckily enough the Wicklow club championship doesn’t start until August, so we’ll see if I can get back for a few games with Tinahely. A lot of the girls are booked to come to Paris, so if they can go there then I can just about manage to tog out for the championship and enjoy the season with them. You know the way research says it’s important to have plans post-Olympics because there can be a down? I’m like, don’t worry about me, I’m going back to play with Tinahely.”

At this rate, the honeymoon will be in 2039.

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