The Ireland men’s hockey team are braced for a pivotal encounter against South Africa on Tuesday after losing their opener to the group’s top seeds Australia on Sunday.
Making their fourth World Cup appearance and their first since 2018, Ireland got off to a bruising start, with the three-time champions Australia blitzing them with three first-half goals.
However, Mark Tumilty’s side rallied well after the break with Alastair Empey tapping home to pull one back as Ireland held the Aussies scoreless in the second half.
Tomorrow, they face a more winnable game against South Africa, who likewise suffered a 3-1 reversal, against Spain, on Sunday.
The Irish team have something of a score to settle against the group’s fourth seeds. They tangled in Cape Town in their final group game in the 2025-26 Nations League.
Ben Nelson struck a brace and Darragh Walsh also scored but the 3-3 draw was sufficient to put the South Africans through from the group on goal difference at Ireland’s expense. However, the former don’t have the benefit of home advantage this time around.
“We’ve played South Africa quite a bit recently. They’ve always been competitive games,” Tumilty told RTÉ Sport.
“They got the draw in Nations Cup there to progress to the semi-finals and we didn’t. So it’ll be a challenge. It’s a different squad we have here than the Nations Cup squad.
“It’ll be an interesting game. There’ll be plenty of attacking hockey played and let’s see if we can get a result and set ourselves up for an opportunity in that final game.”
Ireland’s hopes of nabbing a result from the opening game were sunk early on, with the Aussies taking the lead after a Joel Rinata shot rebounded off the post, hit Jamie Carr on the back and wound up in the goal.
Rinata doubled the favourites’ lead shortly afterwards before Blake Govers effectively settled the contest before the interval with a deflected effort.
Ireland head coach Mark Tumilty
“They were very well set up in the first half,” said Tumilty.
“They had lots of energy and they closed out all the channels that we wanted to try and exploit. So, they probably deserve the credit for that.
“We probably weren’t as adventurous as we needed to be but certainly the second half we started to believe a little bit more in ourselves.
“We probably had nothing to lose in the second half. Pleasing second half performance and hopefully we can build on that.”
Avoiding a slack start on Tuesday is uppermost in Irish players’ minds after they were overrun in the opening period against Australia.
Kyle Marshall admitted that they struggled to cope with the intensity of the Australian pressing in the early stages and it wasn’t until later in the game that they began to adjust.
“[It’s the] first World Cup for 18 of the 20 who are here. Probably just getting used to playing against a team of this quality, who are willing to press you and do full-court press all the time.
“It’s relentless. You try and recreate that in training, obviously, but it’s never going to be exactly how those lads bring that to you.
“So once we kind of recognised that we can deal with that and took a bit of confidence from that, we probably got a bit of a foothold in the game, albeit a bit too late.”
With two games to come in the group, Marshall stressed that Ireland can take huge confidence from the second-half display.
“We were trying to fight fire with fire, take the game to them. We can’t just sit back and take on attack after attack.
“Hopefully [on Tuesday], we can bring the confidence, know that we’re ready to compete at this level and get going from the first minute.”
Watch Ireland v South Africa in the Men’s Hockey World Cup on Tuesday from 3.45pm on RTÉ2 and RTÉ Player. Follow our live blog on RTÉ.ie/sport and RTÉ News app