A meltdown can sometimes be a good thing, shining as it does a spotlight on areas in major need of improvement.

For the Irish women’s hockey team, that’s exactly how they look back on the 5-1 defeat to England at last month’s EuroHockey Championships.

Rather than allow it derail the momentum that has carried them to their first Olympics, it proved a useful lesson in the composure needed when things go awry.

“We’ve reviewed it and figured out what went wrong,” says Deirdre Duke. “We had a 15-minute period where the wheels fell off and things went a bit wrong, a spell in the second quarter where we gave away cheap corners and lost focus for a split second and found ourselves 3-1 down.”

Duke scored an early goal to put Ireland in front but rather than stick to their plan the players began to sit back. Against a team of England’s calibre, things soon went from bad to worse.

“It’s about weathering those purple patches and when they got momentum and pressure we didn’t quite deal with it. Tournament hockey can be a rollercoaster and that’ll serve us very well heading into the Olympics.”

The 29-year-old figured her Olympic dream was over when she was omitted from the initial selection for the EuroHockey Championships but she was a late addition after an injury to Sarah Torrans, and Duke duly played her way into the Olympic squad.

As pleased as she was, her heart went out to others omitted from the final 16, including Nikki Evans, her long-time team-mate at club level with Hermes, UCD and most recently Old Alex.

“It’s been the toughest thing over the last couple of weeks, a bittersweet situation,” she says. “There’s been so many players that contributed to get to this point. It’s a 31-person squad and it’s unfortunate, but it’s part of elite sport and it’s what we sign up to.”

The team will depart for Japan later this week and complete a 10-day training camp in Iwate, almost 500km north of Tokyo, before their opening game against South Africa on July 24. In recent weeks players have been making trips to Belfast to spend time in heat chambers that will simulate the likely conditions in Tokyo, where oppressive heat and humidity are expected.

“We were in a 45-degree sauna for 40 minutes this morning and we’re doing as much as we can,” says Duke. “I’ve never played in those conditions and we’ve been doing bike sessions, running sessions (in a heat chamber) but there’s no comparison to playing at 12 in the day in 90pc humidity. It’s going to be uncomfortable for a lot of teams.”

Ireland will go in ranked ninth in the world so expectations should be tempered in the 12-team tournament, but both the public and players remember well what odds they defied at the 2018 World Cup.

“That silver medal feels like a lifetime ago but we took a huge amount of confidence from that and we’re well aware we can mix it with the top five in the world,” says Duke.

“It’s a very changed squad, we have a new coach and new players, but we’re in a really good place. We have a point to prove at the Olympics. We’re going to throw everything at it.”