Hogan's resilience has brought her this far, now the World Cup awaits

Irish Examiner

a day ago

Brittany Hogan was already a concoction of emotions as the first question was being unspooled in her direction.
Her bottom lip quivered as she stood there in front of the RTÉ cameras, hands on hips, the player of the match medal draped around her neck.
This was April of last year and Ireland had just beaten Scotland 15-12 courtesy of a 73rd-minute Dannah O'Brien penalty in front of a record crowd in Belfast to secure third place in the Six Nations table and qualification for a World Cup that gets underway next Friday.
It would be Ireland's first time at the big dance since they provided the ballrooms in Dublin and Belfast in 2017, so here was catharsis writ large.
Deliverance from the purgatory of Parma in 2021 when a dramatic and late loss to the Scots cost them a place at the last World Cup in New Zealand.
Ireland would be left holding the wooden spoon seven months after that, having lost all five games in the 2022 Six Nations, but clear signs of promise had been evident 12 months later in defeats to France and Italy and a thumping of Wales before 88 unanswered points were shipped to England.
All of which had left them with an outside shot of finishing third in the 2023 table and claiming that golden ticket to the global gig that went with it. For that to happen, they needed Wales to shock Italy earlier in the day, and for Scotland to be sent home in defeat.
Wales, surprisingly, upheld their end of the bargain. They edged the Italians by two points in Cardiff just minutes before kick-off in Belfast, but Ireland head coach Scott Bemand chose not to tell his players about the result across the Irish Sea before kick-off.
And so to the final whistle and to Hogan.
'I was a part of the squad that didn't qualify for the World Cup in Parma and that was one of the lowest points of my career. I can't remember who it was, but I just got told when I was walking over to do the interview that we had qualified, completely secured it. I had no idea.'
That alone would explain the difficulty in finding the words to describe her feelings in that moment, but there was more to it than just the emotional release of qualifying and being blindsided by the news of it seconds before going live on air.
'My partner's dad actually passed away that morning. So it was a big day for a lot of things, and I just tried to make sure that the rugby was where I made everyone proud and tried to make a little happy part of their day.
'As soon as I got the microphone, it was just a big release of everything that I was holding that day. So, yeah, it was a very, like… I don't even know what to describe it as. It was a roller coaster of a day.'
Hogan wasn't the first player or athlete across the sporting spectrum to turn out in the midst of such personal grief, but her performance, coming just hours after such awful news, came from a resilience born of experience.
In February of 2023, Hogan spoke out publicly for the first time about the sexual abuse she experienced as a young teenager, and how it led to her taking on an ambassadorial role with the Irish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (ISPCC).
She lost her father Eamonn just four months later, when a wasp sting triggered a severe allergic reaction while he was driving his youngest daughter home from school, and after which Hogan launched a fundraising campaign for Air Ambulance Northern Ireland.
'I suppose I've been through quite a lot in my life myself anyway. I would have had to turn up to the HPC (the IRFU's High Performance Centre) for sevens training five days a week, and then go to tournaments every four weeks whenever I was going through my own personal things.
'So I was very good, and became very good at, as soon as I crossed those four white lines switching into training. I was into game mode. I was into making sure that I was switched on for my teammates around me and, yeah, I used the tools in my toolbox to be able to do that.'
Hogan's performance that day in Belfast may have been unusual for the circumstances that preceded it, but it was on a par with the impact made throughout an Ireland career that has delivered 34 caps to date and which makes her the fourth most experienced player in the squad.
She is 26 now and a high-class fixture at the No.8 position and in a back row that can still call on plenty of quality for pool games against Japan, Spain and New Zealand, despite the injury-enforced absence of Erin King and, for the early pool stages at least, Aoife Wafer.
Hogan has relished the team's rebuild this last three years, the leaps and bounds made since Parma. And the belief shown in her by Bemand has been the fuel she felt she needed to take her own game to new heights in that time.
'I'm hoping that what I bring to the World Cup is that in those big games and those big moments I'll be able to perform, that I'll be able to actually execute my role for the team.
'I play with a cool head, and it kind of opens me up to be able to see more spaces, or to carry hard, and hard work underpins everything I do. That's hopefully what I'll bring to the World Cup.'