Eimear Ryan: Cora Staunton retires with legacy as a great of AFLW

Cora Staunton announced her retirement from AFLW during the week after 50 games.

LEGEND: Cora Staunton of the Giants celebrates after kicking a goal during the round one AFLW match between the Gold Coast Suns and the Greater Western Sydney Giants at the Great Barrier Reef Arena on January 09, 2022 in Mackay, Australia. (Photo by Ian Hitchcock/Getty Images)

Nearly six years ago, I got the chance to contribute to a series of nonfiction sports books for kids called Great Irish Sports Stars. 

The series was being published by O’Brien Press and they asked me to write about a female Gaelic games star. In spite of my camogie bias, my mind kept returning to footballer Cora Staunton as a subject: a player who had debuted at senior level for Mayo at 13; who had won six All-Irelands with Carnacon and four with Mayo; who had eleven All-Stars, and first-name recognition even among casual GAA fans. When news broke in December 2017 that she was moving to Australia to play in the newly established AFLW, I made up my mind. Narratively speaking, it was hard to think of a better ending for the book than that.

The Australian jaunt turned out to be much more than just a happy ending, however; more than a richly deserved cap on a long, illustrious career. She was 35 heading to Sydney to try her hand at professional sport, without any guarantees about how she would adjust to the increased physicality, the funny-shaped ball, the humidity. She has retired as a great of the game, spoken of in the same glowing terms in the hallways of GWS Giants as she is in Carnacon. Despite her late start, she wasted no time, even recovering from a multiple leg-break in 2019 to come back better than ever.

In all, Cora played for the GWS Giants in 50 games across six seasons, beginning with the AFLW’s sophomore season. Her ability to kick with both feet, from distance and from all angles, means that she finishes her career with 55 goals, as the all-time leading goal-kicker for the Giants, and the joint second all-time goal-kicker in the league overall. 

She has seen the AFLW develop from a league of eight clubs to eighteen; from a semi-pro experiment to one of the most prominent professional women’s leagues in the world, employing over 400 players full-time; from a niche pursuit to a rejuvenated and thriving sport, with half a million girls and women now participating across the country.

And she has provided a template for those coming after her. In what can be regarded as both an incredible opportunity for young Irish sportswomen and a major inconvenience for the LGFA, ten new Irish players have been recruited for the forthcoming eighth season, due to start in August. This will bring the number of Irish AFLW players to at least thirty. It’s a bona fide talent pipeline, of which Cora was the pioneer back in 2017, and it looks set to only expand in the coming years.

One of the most intriguing developments of the last week was the recruitment of three Tipperary players: Niamh Martin to the North Melbourne Kangaroos, and Anna Rose Kennedy and Aishling Moloney to the Geelong Cats. Moloney, in particular, has long been courted as an AFLW prospect, and was a surprise eleventh-hour signing ahead of last Tuesday’s draft deadline. Moloney’s long-range point-scoring is a staple of her ladies football game, a skill she will be hoping to translate to her Aussie rules game – just like Staunton before her.

Though now officially retired in all codes, Staunton is still never far from a playing pitch, and her backroom role with the Galway camogie team will keep her occupied for the rest of the 2023 season. She’s probably even handy with a hurley. Whenever Staunton feels ready to take an extended break, it will be more than deserved. Her legacy will run and run.

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It’s a tough lesson for Tipperary to learn, again, in a different season under a different manager: leading Limerick at halftime is brilliant, but you’ve got to put two strong halves back to back.

To be fair to Tipp, it’s not like they were complacent about their four-point lead at the break in last weekend’s semi-final; just that they had expended so much energy in a ferociously physical first half, when they had really brought the game to Limerick. In the first half, Tipp’s movement was excellent. They threaded several needles through the Limerick defence, bursting off one another’s shoulders and finding space to strike – but crucially, that space was always at point-scoring distance, never within goal-scoring range.

Tipp hunted in packs, pressured Limerick’s short game, intercepted and turned over. They met Limerick’s ferocious physical challenge, with newcomers Alan Tynan and Gearóid O’Connor, in particular, seeming to really relish their first outings against the All-Ireland champions.

But it’s as if Limerick used halftime to adjust, re-calibrate, and re-assert their dominance on the game. Once Peter Casey brilliantly wrangled a goal from a long, lobbing ball, a sense of inevitability took hold of what had been a tense, edge-of-your-seat match. The tempo of Limerick’s game is relentless; any team that wants to topple Limerick will need to not just withstand that tempo, but defuse it as well.

Might that team be Kilkenny? They have, tucked away in the back of their minds, the knowledge that they are the last team to defeat Limerick at knockout stage; a lifetime ago in 2019, yes, but still a psychological advantage. They know they can put two good halves together against the champions.

On the basis of league performance so far, you’d be backing Limerick for the win on Sunday week, but Derek Lyng’s Kilkenny still have another dimension in them that we haven’t yet seen. Much of the chat about the second semi-final understandably focused on Cork’s flatness rather than Kilkenny’s quality, but theirs was a tidy performance drawing on both youth (a beyond-his-years Billy Drennan) and experience (the welcome return of Richie Hogan). The addition of the Ballyhale boys could well be the final puzzle piece that gets them over the line.