Larry Ryan: Celebrate the landmarks on a long journey for Irish women's football

This group seem to be acutely aware that they are carrying the baton, making ground on a trip that started slowly long before them

Fri, 02 Sep, 2022 - 22:17

Larry Ryan

THERE has been some consternation around lately about the scourge of happiness at the end of football matches, our old friend Richard Keys leading the outrage following Arsenal’s disgusting glee at the end of the win over Fulham.

Thankfully, the celebration police took a night off in Tallaght on Thursday night. Somewhere in the background, maybe you could hear a faint tut-tut of our national reality checker. That familiar Cork voice in our heads. We’ve done nothing yet. Nonsense. Do me a favour.

But the kind of folk who are forever on high alert for anyone taking too much enjoyment mainly butted out. Even Keysy might have copped the irony of policing the expression of women from his compound in Qatar.

Journey is a word that has been hijacked and disgraced to flog everything from fad diets to election campaigns. So we really need to upgrade the terminology to capture the sort of trip the Ireland women’s soccer team has been on.

But they are journeywomen in the very best sense, and reaching a World Cup play-off is a landmark reached that had to be celebrated. Even if it now takes them into a bizarre process that looks like one of those madcap solutions drafted every few months to fix Gaelic football.

They were entitled to toast this one with every drop of emotion, and Vera Pauw even coined a distinction that can be freely reused to reassure the killjoy constabulary when they blow the whistle on future scenes of jubilation. We will celebrate, but we won’t party. It could become the new ‘just the one’.

As Karen Duggan put it in punditry, it was a win that laid ghosts to rest. And she didn’t just mean George Hamilton announcing, with three minutes left, that one goal looked like being enough. As it turned out, there was no danger here.

Karen’s RTÉ colleague, Lisa Fallon, pointed out that it’s also a win that will give us time and space to hear more of the varied back stories that allowed this group of women make it this far.

From Áine O’Gorman, a new mother, who has passed every unglamorous staging post along the way here. To Lily Agg, newest in green, who put her hand up to reveal a granny from Cobh and put her head in where it was going to hurt.

Whenever we finally make a World Cup, it might be the time to chart all the personal obstacles overcome, to write down all the times these women wondered if they could really keep playing the game they loved.

Agg played the McAteer role on the anniversary of another famous game that earned us a World Cup play-off. That one produced an iconic photograph at the final whistle, framing the coldest handshake you could imagine between the two central characters. This one gave us the warmest embrace between our two best players.

We often lament that some of our greatest footballers were denied the biggest international stages. John Giles and Liam Brady pinned us on the football map, but were back home when their peers gathered in summer. We wish more for Denise O’Sullivan and Katie McCabe, not just because they sit comfortably among the world’s best, but for the ease and class with which they carry the responsibility of their influence.

Tony O’Donoghue has provided many memorable contributions too on World Cup nights alongside Ireland managers, not all of them entirely cordial. Mostly, his job is to ask a few questions for us. On Thursday he supplied a hug, on behalf of the whole country, for Vera Pauw.

Vera didn’t want to talk any more about “the background”, as she put it, but just wanted to say thanks to a place and a team that was there for her. “Ireland has kept me on my feet. The team gave me the warmth and the strength to be here with the energy that I have.”

Her energy has been a crucial ingredient in this momentum.

The football could have been tidier. It has been before, and maybe it will be again when these games carry a little less significance.

As a country, we have hardly earned the right to a level playing field on these critical nights with our support for women’s sport. This group of women have, but they carry the burden of past indifference and the weight of future hope. O’Sullivan admitted afterwards that nerves had been a factor in the first half, and that she had been thinking about the match and what it meant for weeks.

No doubt, they’d rather look ahead to Slovakia and beyond now, but it was fitting that McCabe looked back first. Afterwards, she talked about meeting Ireland pioneers Paula Gorham and Linda Gorman during the week. The names spilled out of contributors to the cause, many unheralded beyond the football community.

This group seem to be acutely aware that they are carrying the baton, making ground on a journey that started slowly long before them, and where the real rewards will come after most of them have finished playing.

Mind you, Gorman, Ireland’s first female manager, told The42 lately that she still plays walking football, at 68. And the reward for her leg of the journey comes in noticing how many of her team-mates now follow the women’s game.

It is still only five years since Liberty Hall, when they won the right to a tracksuit, wifi, and some respect.

“Victory,” smiled another pioneer, Emma Byrne, after that, in a moment of modest celebration on a landmark evening, before they too went on to play Slovakia.

Forest living the Dream

They were still at it, would you believe, during Sky’s Deadline Day excitement.

“Will Man United agree a deal for Frenkie de Jong before tonight’s deadline?” In the end, Frenkie held tough on this one, just as he did every other day for as long as we can remember.

They were a bit edgy in the morning, it seemed, on Sky. “Big Breaking News just in. Ronaldo is on the bus to Leicester.” A bit of apprehension around that nothing much might happen and they’d need to be going big on whatever snippets landed. But there was plenty to keep them going, in the end, as the Premier League finished off its £2bn splurge.

Nottingham Forest could have kept the show rolling on their own all summer. The great romantic return of the former kings of Europe has taken a bit of a turn, with their 22 signings.

The fans are still living the dream, no doubt. But there are shades of Dream Team and Harchester United about it, at this stage, with a brand new cast on board for the new season.

Come to think of it, Luis Amor Rodriguez is probably a free agent these days. Still time for number 23?

Luis Amor Rodriguez: Still time for Forest to swoop

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