Ireland Women's hockey coach Graham Shaw joined Saturday's Off the Ball as the team's remarkable World Cup journey continues.
Despite being the lowest ranked team in their group - Ireland have qualified for the quarter-finals with a game to spare - ahead of England, USA and India.
The team have made it this far against the odds and only picked up a sponsor, SoftCo, last month.
The green army take on England in their last pool match on Sunday in front of a sell-out crowd of 16,000 fans and speaking to Nathan ahead of the game, Shaw said: "We have a mantra in our team - there's no excuses. We don't make excuses because we don't have the same funding, we can't train the same way, maybe the opposition can train but that doesn't matter - what matters is when we get together and what we do then.
"The group have been absolutely fantastic. When we come together and train as a squad, their attention to detail, their attitude, their commitment to what we're doing is absolutely top notch.
"What we find is that when we get a run of a few weeks consecutively together - you really see the squad growing together, you see the improvements both individually and collectively - in technical and tactical.
"And, I think we've seen that since the middle of May and in the last eight weeks, we've just seen improvements, improvements, improvements - day by day, week by week and I think you can see that in the level of performance over here," he added.
Listen back to the full discussion here:
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