Qualifying for Paris 2024 critical for Ireland - Katie Mullan

Ireland women's hockey captain Katie Mullan feels qualifying for the upcoming Paris 2024 Games will be "critical" if they are to maintain the momentum gained over recent years.

Sean Dancer's side are involved in the final stage of qualifiers in Valencia, Spain this month and will be in a pool with Belgium, South Korea and Ukraine, with the first match against the Belgians on Saturday, 13 January.

To qualify for the Olympics, Ireland will have to get to the semi-finals by finishing top two in the pool and then either reaching the final or winning the third-fourth place play-off.

But Mullan, who was part of the Ireland squads that reached the 2018 World Cup final and then qualified for a maiden Olympics at the delayed Tokyo Games, sees Paris as the next logical step in the journey for this crop of players.

"We qualified for Tokyo pretty soon after the 2018 World Cup and I think this is the next big step for the Irish women's hockey team and it puts down a platform with the new players coming in, we're still at the top and we're very much fighting to be in the top ten in the world and to play in pro leagues and look to fight for medals in major competitions," the 29-year-old told RTÉ Sport's Clare MacNamara.

"And this next step of qualifying for Paris is critical to that. So we're excited and we're ready to go."

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Getting through the qualifying tournament will be a tough gauntlet to run but Mullan is confident that the experience accumulated by the core of the squad, along