Ireland: IRL Women’s Hockey Squad for upcoming FIH Nations Cup in Spain Announced

May 14, Dublin: Interim Head Coach of the Ireland Women’s National team, Facu Quiroga, has announced an 18 strong squad to play in the FIH Nations Cup being hosted in Terrassa, Spain this June.

Ayeisha McFerran misses the tournament due to injury and this has led to Holly Micklem being called into the squad with Liz Murphy.

Before the Nations Cup competition, the squad will head to Antwerp on Thursday May 16th to play three warm-up games. The first of these will be against Italy on Friday May 17th, the second will be against Belgium on Saturday May 18th, and the third will be on Monday May 20th against India.

The squad will then head to Spain on Monday 27th May ahead of their opening game of the FIH Nations Cup. There will be two further warm up games in Spain on Wednesday 29th May in Terrassa, Ireland will take on Chile and then they complete their warm-up games by taking on New Zealand on Friday 31st May.

The participating nations in the competition are :-   Spain, Japan, Korea, Ireland, Chile, Canada, Italy  and New Zealand 

Korea, Italy, Spain and Ireland are drawn in Group A. Each of these opponents will be difficult and present a strong challenge for the Ireland team. The FIH Nations Cup itself gets underway on Monday June 3rd with a game against Spain in Terrassa with an 18:30 start (local time). In their second game of Pool A they play Italy on Tuesday June 4th with a 16:00 start (local time). In their third game of Pool A they play Korea on Thursday June 6 with a 16:00 start (local time).

The place matches get underway at that stage and the format is the 3rd placed Team in Pool A plays the 4th placed team in Pool B and the 4th placed team in Pool A plays the 3rd placed team in Pool B. These are the 5th/8th placed play offs. The top two in each pool are deemed semi-finalists and the draw for those semi-finals is already known and is as follows. The 1st placed team in Pool A plays the 2nd placed team in Pool B and then the 1st placed team in Pool B plays the 2nd placed team in Pool A. And the winners of the two semi-finals will play off for the FIH Nations Cup while the two losing semi-finalists will play off for 3rd and 4th place.

This competition counts towards ranking points and could have a bearing on Ireland’s World Rankings which again could have a bearing on how difficult a draw might be for the team in future qualification competitions at European and World Cup level in the coming months and years.