'These girls keep shocking people'

PREVIEW: ZuCar All Ireland U18 A Ladies Football Championship Final

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by Eamon A. Donoghue

Roscommon’s Ladies minor footballers may be underdogs against Cork, who historically have lorded it at this grade, but manager Trevor Clohessy says: “These girls keep shocking people.”

Speaking to the Westmeath Independent from the side’s recent training centre at Coláiste Chiaráin, Clohessy said: “Cork are the benchmark”, pointing out that they had won 13 of the 18 All-Ireland finals they had competed in.

Cork are the reigning champions and by far the most successful county at this level, with Galway next in the roll of honour with seven titles. In contrast, Roscommon have never won an All-Ireland minor A final.

“The current champions are undefeated for two years and if you were to look at stats alone, you’d get afraid, but Roscommon girls are also undefeated this year, we beat Mayo twice and their squad was made up of players that had reached two consecutive All-Ireland U16 finals,” Clohessy said.

“I don’t think they (Cork) thought they would be facing Roscommon in the final but these girls keep shocking people and anyone that saw the games against Mayo and Down could see what incredible footballers we have.”

The journey to the All-Ireland final began in November when over a hundred girls battled to be part of the squad.

Roscommon struggled to find a training base at home in their own county, and their manager Trevor Clohessy had contacts with the state-of-the-art facilities in Glenamaddy and that became their home for the winter months.

‘’We trained for the first few months in Glenamaddy and then after we won the Connacht final, we moved to Coláiste Chiaráin in the Clann na nGael club area and we have been there since,’’ the captain Shauna McGrath explained.

Roscommon play a very direct, fast game of football, with intensity and it rattled all opponents and proved to be successful. They have worked hard in training on getting a strategy in place that works for them.

‘’Training is very intense and everyone is competing for places. There’s a positive buzz I suppose around the training as well, because everyone wants to be in the first 15 - wants to be in the first 30. I think everyone is improving as we go,’’ vice captain Laura McSharry, from the Fourmilehouse club in Kilbride, explained.

‘’We do one gym session a week that consists of weights and bikes and then we do a lot of running to keep up the fitness and speed work, because we are quite a fast team and we need to break the lines when we play other teams’’ captain McGrath said.

This group of players has competed in U16 campaigns, and a number of the squad like the two captains, have played minor last year, but the improvement in the team from two years ago is like night and day, and McGrath and McSharry attribute the tightness of the group to having trust in the management and belief in each other.

‘’We are a lot closer now to any teams we played for before, a very tight bunch and we trust each other on and off the pitch. We have trust in the management and that has worked so far,” said captain McGrath.

“Having belief in each other has helped out on the pitch because you will run that extra mile and you’ll die on that pitch for the girl beside you.

“This belief we have has definitely come from management because as I said, they were the ones that believed in us from the start, they believed in us back in November when nobody else did.”

That belief now extends to the possibility of making history.

‘’Cork are big, physical and fast, we’ll take them on when they come like every team we go in against, we are the underdogs going into this game, no one believed in us getting to this All-Ireland A so, getting this far, we’ll give it our best on the day,” McGrath said.

There’s a strong contingent of 13 South Roscommon players in the squad, with Padraig Pearses having the biggest representation with five players and all five were on the field in the fourth quarter against Down in the semi-final.

The local players are Lily Finneran, Laura Glennon, Esmae Halpin, Sarah Kate Goode, and Chloe Mulryan (Padraig Pearses), Katie Dolan, Amy Lennon and Christina Waldron (Clann na nGael), Sarah Jane O’Connor and Gemma Casey (St Dominic’s), Meabh Finneran and Elizabeth Coyle (Four Roads) and Alison Nugent (St Brigid’s).

Manager Clohessy, a Clare native, has brought his experience of managing Galway to an All-Ireland U14 title, and being involved with Galway senior ladies on All-Ireland final day in Croke Park, to the table.

“I think the input from the start has been really incredible. Obviously when I came in here I had great intentions and all that, but you need buy-in from the players, buy-in from the coaches and we let them develop their own objectives and cultures in the workshop that we did. They set the objectives, they wanted to win a Connacht title, they wanted to reach an All-Ireland final, so buy-in has been paramount for this process,” he explained.

Roscommon Ladies football is on a crest of a wave, with three teams, U16, minor and senior in All-Ireland finals. The U16s subsequently won their final after this interview.

‘’The rising tide brings everyone into the harbour,” he said, before adding that the focus must now be on taking the opportunities.

“It’s nice getting to the All-Ireland finals but it’s not about getting to them, it’s about winning them.”

Clohessy said if Roscommon win the All-Ireland intermediate final they will play at senior level next year and minor players will be needed over the next five or ten years to build a long-term foundation for the seniors.

However, he cautioned that it’s not an easy transition from minor to senior due to college and other distractions.“It’s not always the case, that your seven or eight footballers going up to senior next year will always make it,’’ Clohessy said.

Preparation and training are key for this team over the past nine months together on the journey. They now train in Coláiste Chiaráin school in Summerhill with six girls in the squad students at the school.

“The facilities here in Coláiste Chiaráin are excellent,” Clohessy said.

“We were up in Glenamaddy two nights a week for months, and we were training in the bad weather when some of the top teams were not training, we trained on their astro pitch, we had a lot of our games up there, and once the Connachts were over and we had won the Connacht A final, our main mission was to find a base closer for the South Roscommon girls, and we were so lucky that one of the parents of one of the players Christina Waldron, Brendan is the principal here, and he provided the facilities to us

‘’To be able to train on grass here in Coláiste Chiaráin the last ten/eleven weeks showed in our result against Down in the All-Ireland semi final.”

Throw-in, 4pm, Saturday, Glenisk O'Connor Park, Tullamore.