It was because that player – Sophie Conroy – scored the extra-time golden goal which handed his side a 3-2 victory over Souths in the Bathurst Women’s Hockey Association first grade grand final.

Things were locked up at 2-all after regulation time at Bob Roach Field and following the first 10-minute period of addition time, no winner came.

But then Conroy struck.

“It was a well out of position Sophie Conroy who scored, but I’ll forgive her,” Fulton said.

“Kate Brown [goalkeeper] was absolutely brilliant for them, she saved them all day long. She stopped a lot of hockey balls and really kept them in it.

“But when you’re banging them up against the ’keeper all day long, eventually your midfield creeps up towards the top of the circle and that’s what happened. Little [Kristy Ekert] had a shot and it got saved, but Sophie was standing high in the circle and she just chipped it in.”

Conroy had been impressive a week earlier when St Pat’s downed Waratahs in the preliminary final, setting up a meeting with minor premiers Souths in the decider.

Souths had downed Pat’s 3-2 in the major semi-final and Fulton said they were favourites for the title. 

But the Saints scored first on Saturday and Souths had to rally to get back on equal terms. The two blues scored again but late in the second half things were once more locked up.

As the clock ticked towards 70 minutes Pat's pressured for the winner, but it didn’t come.

“Souths have been the benchmark all year, they gave us a 13-0 touch up there once when we were a bit short,” Fulton said.

“We scored early and I’m thankful that we weren’t chasing the whole game because that helps give the kids a bit of a sniff that they could do it. We did go back a little bit and they got a couple of goals.

“We were scrambling right in front of their goal there with about a minute to go and just couldn’t put it in, so it did go to extra-time.”

Fulton’s tactics for extra-time was to pin Souths down their end of the field.

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“We’ve seen enough of them to know if you play the ball back in your own end, you are going to concede a goal – it happens nine times out of 10,” he said.

“So we went out there with the idea that we are not going to play hockey in our half. It doesn’t really matter if it’s ugly when you bash it down the other end and try and lock it in there, but it wins extra-time games.

“We had a lot of attack, I think we did enough to win the game … but they were still an extremely hard team to beat.”

As well as enjoying the premiership, Fulton said the big plus for 2018 was the development of the Saints’ juniors.

“We had a bit of a change in tact this year, we sort of threw in a few of our juniors who weren’t up to first grade into first grade,” he said.

“We thought is it making our juniors a little bit lazy not making them work hard for the ball, so we thought we’ll chuck them in then get our prem girls to come back and help them out. It’s good to get the win, but it’s far more important for us to make Premier League players out of our juniors.”