This time around New York visitors will be all business

THE eastern section of Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx contains a little haven of the GAA known locally as Paddy’s Field.

It’s a tight pitch, rendered all the cosier by the tall trees that surround the perimeter fence.

Presumably, on windy days neither team would feel hindered nor favoured. And if you happened to find yourself walking west along 240th St towards the park, away from St Barnabas High School, you would find yourself wondering where all that shouting was coming from.

Last Saturday morning, I hurried by the edges of the park struggling to find Paddy’s Field.

Somewhere in there, the New York Ladies football team were operating a training camp for the under-10 girls of St Brigid’s Ladies GAA club, who share this parcel of land with the St Barnabas men.

They popped up in this column a few weeks back before they headed to Carlow for the All-Ireland junior championship quarter-final — ‘me of little faith’, I was sure that was going to be my one and only chance of getting them a couple of Wednesday column inches.

But they went ahead and dispensed with Carlow and Wexford on the way to this Sunday’s junior showdown with Wicklow.

I even remember regretting not being able to fit in a decent line or two about their veteran manager Phil Sheridan.

After all, up at Rockland that night in August, he had been kind enough to hand me some mosquito spray as the vicious little tyrants hovered around during the panel’s final training game before what we didn’t know then would be a surprisingly successful trip to Ireland.

Sheridan, a Cavan native of Crosserlough, has lived here for 35 years and has been a member of the Cavan NY club for most of that time.

Almost 20 years ago, current chairwoman and veteran forward Rosie O’Reilly Broderick (also Cavan) asked him to take over the running of the fledgling ladies’ team.

“I went up one night to watch them train. It’s like anything else, once I did that I was hooked.”

Twelve years ago all their hard work almost paid off when Sheridan’s exiles reached an All-Ireland final, only to lose to a far superior Tyrone side.

Years without a county team followed until this summer and the rise in standards has been remarkable, according to Sheridan. “It’s totally different now. It’s all game plans now, a very different style of play. Preparations are more intense. The panel too, you’re winning games because of your five subs.”

Although able to take a back seat for once this morning as his charges put their charges through the motions, his phone is ringing constantly.

This may be a far humbler event than the senior football final, which is still ahead of us, but the subject is reassuringly familiar when he is forced to break off from our discussion.

“Is it for the match or the banquet?”

There are a couple of other survivors from that game in 1999: one of the midfielders was Bronx-born Alison Lineen. Now she’s a goalkeeper and her surname is Leyden. And although she remembers almost every kick of their shock semi-final victory over Waterford, she doesn’t remember the 17-year-old blonde playing for the opposition who would be promoted to the senior ranks of the Déise soon after that loss.

Molly O’Rourke went on to win an All Star with Waterford in 2003 but now she’s the New York captain dreaming of a strangely appropriate way of making amends for that disappointment at the start of her senior career.

“We didn’t know much about them,” recalls O’Rourke. “We went into the game the same way Wexford went into our game [the semi-final this year, a 0-10 to 0-5 victory in Birr]. It was a very tough defeat.”

But now, along with teammates like Imelda Mullarkey, who won All-Irelands with Mayo in 1999 (against Molly and Waterford) and 2000, and vice-captain Catriona Brady, who played for 11 years with Monaghan, winning titles at minor and senior level, the Croke Park dream is alive and kicking once again.

Cleverly, the panel had a tour of Croke Park during their 10-day trip to Ireland which, as Sheridan points out, will hopefully take a bit of the edge off.

“It’s unreal, it’s going to be daunting but that’s what we wanted to do,” continues O’Rourke, who also pointed out the other bit of experience they picked up last time around: beating the jetlag after tonight’s flight home.

“We just need to get back on Irish time as soon as we can, no sleeping during the day, we just have to keep going once we land.

It’ll take a day but we have the extra day and, let’s be honest, jetlag isn’t going to stop us at Croke Park.

“It’s going to take everything we have but we’ll give it all.”

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