Blue shoots welcome in Waterford football renaissance

Roll back the carpet by a couple of decades and one group in this year’s TG4 All-Ireland ladies senior football championship would have had everyone agog.

Whenever Waterford and Monaghan clashed in the Nineties, the ground shook.

It was the era when the Decies were the absolute queens of the big ball.

From their debut All-Ireland final in 1991 they won four titles in five years, two against the Farney.

Monaghan eventually ended their unbeaten final streak in 1997 but they got revenge a year later, winning their fifth and last crown.

After two more final wrestles (1999-2000) they ceded dominance to Mayo and the crown eventually took root in Cork but now rests in Dublin.

Monaghan too, have now fallen from grace, but the sight of them both together in a group with the current champions this summer, makes for plenty of nostalgia.

Waterford haven’t won a Munster senior since 2002 but, after seven years in the championship’s second tier, they won the 2015 All-Ireland intermediate final and are back contesting senior provincial finals.

And the joyous celebrations in Parnell Park in early May, when they blasted home five goals past Kerry to win the Division Two title, showed that blue shoots are still there.

“We were in Division Three in 2016 so getting promotion to Division One was fantastic and hopefully we can compete there next year,” captain Karen McGrath says.

Waterford ladies’ stellar history will never be lost on her because McGrath hails from Ballymacarbry, that rich seam which provided virtually every diamond to their gems of the ‘90s.

“I’d have caught the tail of it and played with some of them. Actually a lot of them are after coming back in a club junior team now, the likes of Geraldine and Martina Ryan,” she grins.

“Sure we can’t get enough of football down there!”

McGrath is only 24 but old enough to appreciate what’s gone before and more recently, especially that intermediate All-Ireland in 2015, which she still likens to an out-of-body experience.

“Honestly, you look back now and wish you could have absorbed it even more. I was only in second year in college and it was just hard to believe.”

Yet at times she must feel like a veteran.

Only six of that team started this year’s Division 2 final when Waterford’s defence included three 20-year-olds and teenage ‘keeper Rosie Landers (17). McGrath’s Ballymac’ clubmate Kelly Ann Hogan is another 17 -year-old starter and the Murray triplets are still only 21.

The team still depends on stalwarts like Michelle Ryan, Maria Delahunty, Aileen Wall and Róisín Tobin and their youth exacerbates a problem that is all too common in ladies football; the too rapid turnover of players.

Megan Dunford (20) and Rebecca Casey (20), key defenders in the league, are gone travelling this summer, and J1s and Erasmus Studies have deprived them of other talents this year and last.

“We’ve lost five or six since the league final, we knew they were going, they’d planned it since January and you’re not going to begrudge anyone going away,” McGrath says. “Everyone has a limited time where they can do some travelling.”

But she agrees that the seasonal exodus hits women’s football far harder than men’s, saying “it is harder to keep girls in the summer, probably because the support systems and competition structures are very different.”

Manager Ciarán Curran has brought in some more youngsters to shore them up but having to face the All-Ireland champions in today’s group opener isn’t ideal. When they last met Dublin, in an All-Ireland quarter-final three years ago, Waterford lost by 11 points and Sinead Aherne scored 1-9 (6f).

They’ll be ranked underdogs again today, even though Aherne is out injured, but these are the occasions they must rise to if Waterford’s great ladies’ tradition is to be restored.

“We played Cork twice in Munster. They hammered us the first day but we learned a lot about them and had a plan for the final,” McGrath observes.

They still won but we had goal chances in both halves and played much better. We really clicked in the league final.

“Everything went right for us but our problem is that we’re so hit and miss,” she acknowledges. “If you want to improve you really need to be playing the top teams. Playing the likes of Cork and Dublin, that’s what you play for.”