Rena out to atone for camogie heartache

Coming from anyone else, it could sound a little hollow. After all, Cork’s Rena Buckley has a perfect record in All-Ireland football finals heading into Sunday’s latest one against Kerry.

Yet when she references the stinging pain of defeat, she is speaking from experience, very raw and recent experience.

Just last Sunday fortnight, she was among the group of Cork camogie players that crumpled to the Croke Park turf in desolation after losing the final to Wexford.

With 15 minutes of that game left, they only trailed by two points but were blown away by the sheer ferocity of a late Wexford scoring spree.

She, and fellow long-time dual player Briege Corkery, had little time to sit and sulk, however, with this weekend’s rescheduled football final looming large. With six of the last seven ladies titles under their belts, Cork are naturally favourites to overcome their great Munster rivals, though Buckley has learned to take little for granted at Croke Park.

“Myself and Briege certainly don’t want to taste that kind of defeat again,” said Buckley, reflecting on the camogie heartache. “I suppose it does take a bit out of you mentally. It’s a harder game to lose than any other game, an All-Ireland final. A lot of sideshows that go on with it too.

“It can be hard to refocus again. The flip side is that you realise it’s a match you need to perform in. And if you can put all the sideshows to one side and win, then you enjoy it an awful lot more. But, yeah, it’s an awful place to lose.”

In truth, few expect Buckley to come out on the losing side again this weekend. Just four of William O’Sullivan’s Kerry players have ever played at Croke Park before. He brought them to the camogie final to get a feel for the place but the majority of his players will never have set foot in the dressing rooms or ran down the corridor that leads out onto the famous pitch.

“We didn’t look for any acclimatising session or anything like that because we couldn’t get onto the pitch anyway, so there wasn’t much point,” argued O’Sullivan. “What we did was we came up for the camogie final, as a group. The only thing we missed out on was the dressing room and I don’t see that as much of an advantage to have been in there before.”

Yet O’Sullivan, a member of the Legion club in Killarney, admits it is something of a shot in the dark taking his callow team to GAA Headquarters to face a Cork team dominating the game like his native Kingdom did back in the 1980s.

“There is a great unknown, about how they’ll deal with the occasion,” he admitted. “All you can do is prepare as best you can. But you can’t say with any conviction that they’re all going to be firing 100% on the day. There’s always one or two that will be affected by the occasion. You just have to hope that, as a team, they react to that.”

O’Sullivan has several minors on his team. He says the rest are generally between the ages of 18 and 22. Keeping the same group together for the last few years is a big achievement, though he is pragmatic about the challenge of taking on Cork.

“They’d be seen the same way in ladies football as Kerry would have been seen in men’s football for a number of years,” he said. “They’re an absolutely brilliant team. They’ve raised the bar since they first captured the All-Ireland and everyone else has been trying to catch them since.

“They’ve had no consistent opponent over the last eight years or so. It takes that kind of effort just to catch up to them. You might catch up one or two years but you certainly can’t keep that kind of effort going.”