Presumably we've all recovered from the madness of Ireland's shootout win against Canada on Sunday evening? It was frankly outrageous. Sporting drama at its finest. There were many heroines on show, including Róisín Upton, who nailed the sudden death winning penalty just in the nick of time. Her nerve was matched by tremendous technique, stopping the ball dead on the endline before swiveling and burying it with a second left on the clock.
Turns out she did it all with a broken wrist!
Speaking to the Limerick Leader, Upton explained: "I broke the top of my ulna. There was just a point in the match where I felt I couldn't grip my stick properly and my wrist was quite sore, so I'm not too sure if I had a fall or got a bang. It was a physical game, there were so many collisions."
After winning the shootout, Upton was called in for a drug test along with the Canadian captain. With her adrenaline levels dying down she began to sense something more serious was wrong, "I just couldn't open some of the bags, different things and I knew then my wrist was quite sore."
An x-ray on Monday showed her wrist to be fractured and she will now be in a cast for a couple weeks. A price she's no doubt happy to pay for Olympic qualification. Upton told the BBC after their historic win that "I had tried to imagine what this moment might feel like, and, to be honest, it's 20 million times better. There is nothing I can say to put into words what this means."
The Irish team made all sorts of history with their victory, qualifying for the Olympics for the first time, while the attendance of 6,137 in Energia Park was the biggest crowd for a women's international sporting event in Ireland ever.
