At a towering four feet eleven, Olivia O'Toole was not designed by nature to strike terror into international soccer defenders. Next month she will lead the Irish line against a German women's team "built like tanks" (her description), whose goalkeeper "looks like Oliver Kahn" (ditto). But size isn't everything. The diminutive striker's most meaningful statistic is 48 goals in 56 international appearances, a record that stands tall in any company, writes Frank McNally.
It probably helps that she's from Dublin's Sheriff Street. Even among Irish people who have never been there, the address evokes a range of emotions, all on the general theme of fear. This might be lost on foreigners. But toughness is a birthright in Sheriff Street and helps make up for short stature. Having lived there for 35 years, Olivia O'Toole has seen worse things than German defenders.
In the late 1980s, she and her siblings were just the right age to experience the full joys of the inner city's heroin epidemic. Four of her immediate family were addicted at one time, including her younger sister Julie, who has since written a book about it. Julie's turning point came the second time heroin almost killed her. "The ambulance people thought she was dead. She was cold and her lips had turned purple. At the hospital, she died on the table twice, and they brought her back twice."
The family's eldest, now 37, was one of the area's first heroin users 20 years ago. She is clean now too and, like Julie, working with a Christian group in the US. But she knows she dodged a bullet: "All the people who got her into heroin are now dead."
Olivia avoided drugs, apart from a 15-a-day cigarette habit about which she remains defensive. She overcompensates in training, and takes some pride in the fact that Ireland manager Noel King uses her fitness to harangue other players. "He's always giving out to them, saying: look what she can do and she's a smoker." The real drug in Olivia's life is football. She was hooked by the age of six, playing with boys' teams until she was 14, when she made history by being ejected from a Dublin under-age league for not having the required gender: "It was all over the Herald at the time". At 15, she graduated to the "Drumcondra Ladies" senior side, and at 19 made her debut for Ireland, scoring in a 1-0 win in Seville.
Forty-seven goals later, it's the ones she didn't score that preoccupy her. In the away leg against Germany earlier this year, she was incorrectly called offside when one-on-one with Oliver Kahn. "I know I would have scored," she says, with a steely edge in her voice.
As it was, a mere 1-0 defeat away to the world champions set a new high-water mark for Ireland. Purists and people who think women's football is charmingly naive should avert their eyes now. But as well as organisation and grit, that rearguard exercise was marked by the judicious use of time-wasting (a particularly important skill for strikers, who have frequent opportunities to require medical treatment). "We analysed the video afterwards and I think we wasted eight minutes, between one thing and another."
As the team flew out to San Diego yesterday for a friendly with the US - an invitation probably earned by the performance in Germany - O'Toole knows her record-breaking days are numbered. She lost the captaincy this year and no longer assumes she'll be first-choice striker: "I'm getting on a bit and the manager has to try different things." Next year will probably be the end. And then? "I don't know what I'm going to do. I know nothing else."
That's not exactly true. For the past four years, O'Toole has been training under-age teams in Sheriff Street, part of her job as a recreation officer with Dublin City Council. It's not as glamorous as playing in San Diego, but it's important work. Hard drugs are still a scourge in the area. She works with kids whose mothers are on heroin, and although she never broaches the subject of a parent's addiction, she will try to steer the youngster away from going the same road.
Sheriff Street is at the front edge of a collision of cultures these days. Ever since the IFSC landed nearby, like a giant alien spacecraft, the aboriginal population has unprecedented access to cappuccino bars and other trappings of yuppiedom.
But Sheriff Street remains an independent enclave, one that extends well beyond the confines of its name. A key difference between newcomers and natives is that, when asked where they live, the former use their exact addresses: Seville Place, etc. By contrast, someone like Olivia will always say she comes from "Sheriff Street", although she actually lives around the corner from it.
It's not a street, it's a community. And for all its problems, it has a wealth of talent. Everywhere, Olivia sees potential - "singers, actors, footballers" - that just needs channelling. The footballers are her responsibility. One of her proteges recently made the preliminary squad for the Irish girls' under-17 team. And it won't stop there. "I have a goalkeeper, a defender, and a forward who will all play for Ireland one day," she says, with that same edge in her voice.