A year ago, Vikki Wall was in Ireland camp, watching on her phone as her other life whirred away on the other side of the planet. Her North Melbourne team-mates were collapsing in the AFLW Grand Final, giving up a seven-point lead in the final quarter. She put her phone in her pocket when it was over and got on with the job in hand, which was to try and make the Ireland Olympic rugby Sevens squad.
That was who she was now, one of 19 players chasing the 12 spots for Paris. Australia went into a lockbox, stowed away on a shelf in another room. Twelve months on, she is sitting in her house in Melbourne, chatting away about everything that has happened since.
She didn’t make the squad for the Olympics. She went back to her roots for a week and played for Meath but made no impact. She returned to North Melbourne and ended the year kicking two goals in the Grand Final as the Roos picked up their first title. By any measurement, she had a year like nobody else in Irish sport.
A good one? A bad one? Where do you start?
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“If I knew the whole outcome of this whole year, I definitely would do it all over again,” she says. “I think it’s definitely made me a more balanced sportsperson.
“I worked with a sports psychologist in Sport Ireland, just talking about athletes that didn’t make the Olympics. And part of it was to maybe acknowledge that’s actually a pretty all right to get close to making the Olympic team. But it definitely took me a good while to get to that stage. I probably wasn’t looking at the year like that for a good while.”
She gave it everything. Wall joined up with the extended Sevens squad in September 2023, nine months out from the final selection date. Athletically, she was an ideal candidate – fast, strong, elusive, aerobic. The question was, could she learn the game in time.
Her season in the AFLW gave her a chance on that front. It meant she had experience of what it feels like to unlearn, to rewire the synapses in a game situation. But for all that Gaelic football and Aussie Rules are unique in their own ways, they are essentially dialects of the same tongue. Rugby Sevens is a different language entirely.
“The transition to AFLW is a lot simpler,” she says. “The game, the rules, our skills from Gaelic football are a lot more transferable. You get a little bit more leeway as well – the game can slow down, say if you take a mark or things like that. It’s more stop-start. Whereas I would describe rugby Sevens as a bit more relentless.
“I would say when I’m playing well, I’m not doing a massive amount of thinking, if that makes sense. You’re in a flow state, you’re not doubting yourself, you’re not thinking much. You’re just acting off instinct. That’s when I would say I’m playing my best.
“So trying to pick up a new sport and play it to its highest level, it’s no good just knowing the rules. I need to know the nuances. Obviously I wouldn’t be content just knowing, ‘This is the play’. I wanted to know the why behind it because then I can actually understand it. So even that in itself was a massive challenge.”
One she relished. She knew from the get-go that she faced an uphill task to make the final 12 but she also knew that wasn’t the way to look at it. She’s seen enough and done enough to know she had to try and eat the elephant one bite at a time. To anyone on the outside, Vikki Wall was fighting to make it to the Olympics. But her day-to-day on the inside was a far more incremental process.
“It was, ‘Get picked to play my first game.’ Then it was, ‘Get picked to go to a tournament.’ Then you can focus on what you’re doing well and what you’re not doing well. But you have to tick a lot of boxes before you even get there.
“So I went to the Dubai Invitational, didn’t go to Cape Town but got to go to Perth. Those small little milestones were what I was aiming for along the way. I don’t think I ever didn’t give myself a chance of making it. You’re holding out hope all the way to the end. I think we were all like that.”
In the end, the selectors went another way. Though she was devastated in the moment, Wall is able to break their decision down and rationalise it pretty straightforwardly. The margins between her and some of the women who’ve been playing rugby all their life were small but they were real. It would have been wilful to ignore them.
“I reckon a good few things needed improving,” she says. “My tackle technique – I was definitely still tackling people too high. That was something I was aware of and was working towards. I reckon time probably is what it came down to. There were things that were only starting to click about a month before and you’d be going, ‘Oh right, that makes sense’. So maybe I ran out of time a bit.
“Obviously, I don’t begrudge anyone that was selected. I understand sport. I think the position I put myself in, coming in with nine months to go, you kind of have to make sure that you’re so good at it that you don’t give them a choice. Whereas I knew that if there was a grey area between a couple of players, I was probably going to be the first out.”
She still went to Paris. The women who didn’t make the squad but who had been there throughout the selection period were brought along and sat in the stands as Lucy Mulhall and her team finished seventh. It was an undeniably strange experience, sitting there as not quite a player and not quite a fan. It was all a bit discombobulating.
But it had been that kind of month. The Ireland squad was announced on June 17th. The following Sunday, Meath beat Tipperary to qualify for the All-Ireland quarter-final on July 6th. Wall hadn’t played a game of football in a year. But she was around and Meath were asking. What else was she going to do only jump back in with family?
“I had mixed enough feelings towards it,” she says. “Like, the big question for me was whether or not I was going to be able to add anything. I hadn’t been there in a year and obviously you don’t want to upset the dynamic of the team.
“But really, once I was being asked to come in, there was probably only one answer. Even if they came back to me in 10 years and asked me to play for Meath, I don’t think I’d ever be able to say no.
“The week itself was chaotic. I went in for a couple of training sessions and then the match against Kerry, which we didn’t get the result we wanted in. It was very good for me to be around people who know me so well just in that period after not making the Olympics. It was probably an emotional week. I was just so happy to be there, to get training and playing and just having the grá that I do for it. It was just a very welcome week.”
She knew people were stepping around her, all the same. Her sporting career has always been a story of success. All-Ireland intermediate title at 22. Footballer of the Year at 23. Back-to-back senior All-Irelands at 24. This, to all intents and purposes, was the first time she had set out to do something that hadn’t come off. She could tell that the people around her weren’t quite sure how to play it.
“I had real empathy for my friends and family,” she says. “They obviously don’t want to say the wrong thing. They’re trying to be supportive. But then obviously they all know me pretty well in terms of how I would have viewed initially and how I would have been feeling.
“Your first reaction is, it’s not success. It’s not success, in the way you usually view the expectation you have on yourself. I’ve obviously been fairly privileged to be involved in sport where I’m consistently on the first team, starting games. But this was a different experience.
“I was in or around the middle-to-lower end of the bracket and I was there, hoping to be brought on or to be involved. And it gave me that different perspective to take with me back to my other sport. It gave me a whole new sense of team dynamics and of what every squad member is going through. It made me a better person and a better sportsperson. I’ve taken so much from the year in that way.”
All of it meant that when she went back to Melbourne in the autumn, the Vikki Wall they got was a different version to the one that left. Older, wiser, maybe carrying a little bruising around the ego. Above all, ready for an all-out assault on the new season.
“I would say I came back with a much more opportunistic kind of approach than when I arrived in 2022. Back then, I came off the back of an All-Ireland, it was all a whirlwind, I spent the first six-seven weeks learning the sport. I was engrossed in it. I’m not very patient, is what I’d say and that first time around, I was just trying to do everything straight away.
“I struggled with that when I went into the Sevens as well. I’d be trying to do something new and I’d be getting annoyed with myself. Like, ‘F**k, come on, you should be getting this quicker.’
“So then when I came over this time, because of everything that had happened over the year, I almost just felt a deep breath of relief. Just being like, ‘You’re actually pretty good at this. Just grab this and just go with it’.
“I didn’t want to be content. I wanted to work on everything. Not to an excessive degree, but just anything I could do that I felt was going to benefit me. Just really immerse myself in this. I feel like I threw myself into it a bit more.”
North Melbourne burned through the season unbeaten. Wall had a terrific year in front of goal, culminating in her 13-point haul last weekend. Along with Cork woman Erica O’Shea, she continued the tradition of the AFLW champions featuring a couple of Irish players on the podium.
As for what’s next, she’s heading home for Christmas soon and will sit down with the IRFU in the coming weeks. All going well, she will play Sevens again in 2025 and take it from there. There’s more Aussie Rules in her future obviously. There’ll surely always be some bit of room for Meath football in there too.
On she goes, then. Exploring her limits. Chasing success in whatever form it comes.
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