Kilkenny determined to add to title haul, warns exile Elaine Aylward

Cork's Briege Corkery on the break past Kilkenny's Elaine Aylward during the 2014 All-Ireland final. Aylward will be on TV duty for this weekend's semi-finals. Picture: Eddie O'Hare

Elaine Aylward is on RTÉ co-commentary duty for Saturday’s All-Ireland camogie semi-final between Galway and Tipperary.

But the former Kilkenny captain will land into the Páirc Uí Chaoimh press area long before she is due on air in order to catch the first of the afternoon’s semi-finals involving her native county and hosts Cork.

Alyward’s journey to Páirc Uí Chaoimh will not see her drive south from Kilkenny; rather she’ll make the much shorter spin up from the West Cork village of Enniskeane.

“I’m inside enemy lines,” Aylward quips during her lunch break at Clonakilty’s AIB branch. “My husband, Colin, is from Enniskeane. I am down here since 2016,” she adds, by way of explanation.

Aylward’s relocation to West Cork two years after she retired from the inter-county scene brought her into direct contact with one of the game’s then-rising stars.

Enniskeane’s Orla Cronin has since established herself as one of camogie’s most stylish and intelligent forwards; the 2017 All-Ireland final Player of the Match heads into this weekend’s fixture as Cork’s leading championship scorer with 0-20 to her name and is the player who will be top of the Kilkenny watchlist.

Although she has been in Enniskeane for four years now, Aylward continues to play her club camogie with Mullinavat in Kilkenny. The almost five-hour round trip for a Tuesday or Thursday evening training is anything but feasible, and so the 2009 All-Star defender has been falling in with the locals midweek since moving down.

She being a half-back and Cronin a half-forward, surely they’ve picked up one another at Enniskeane training?

“Every now and again they give me that challenge,” says Aylward, her tone suggesting it is not always the most pleasant of experiences.

“I think it is because nobody else wants to mark her at club training that they always pick on me being the outsider. Marking Orla certainly keeps me on my toes.

“It would be fascinating to put a playercam on her for an entire game and just watch her runs and her movement, and then on top of that, her striking is just so sweet.

“Even the free-taking, to step into Orla Cotter’s shoes this year hasn’t been a bother to her. She has been just brilliant.”

Cronin hit 11 points five from play — as Enniskeane overcame Aghabullogue to claim Cork intermediate honours in mid-September. Aylward was on the sideline serving as selector.

“Enniskeane have been really good to let me train with them, and I’ve been more than happy to give them a hand as selector the past couple of years.

“Moving down to West Cork, you think you are coming into football country, but they are hurling mad here, and there are a couple of really driven people in the club.

“Wherever you go in the world, when you can talk camogie and hurling with others, you’ll make friends and acquaintances fairly quickly. It has been no different here in Enniskeane.”

Still very much a Kilkenny woman at heart, she says the team-mates she left behind will not be content to end their respective inter-county careers with the solitary All-Ireland medal they picked up in 2016.

Either side of that final win over Paudie Murray’s Cork, there have been All-Ireland final defeats in 2014, ’17, ’18 (all to Cork) and ’19.

Indeed, some current panellists such as Collette Dormer, Anne Dalton, and Denise Gaule were there alongside Aylward for the 2009 defeat to Cork.

“Not being content with their one All-Ireland medal, I think that is why so many of the players are coming back year on year. It would have been very easy to look around last year after being beaten in your third All-Ireland final in a row and say: ‘That’s it, that’s my lot, I am throwing the towel at this.’

“In fairness, they are all back and driving it on again. To the fore have been the long-serving players, the likes of Denise Gaule, Anne Dalton, Collette Dormer, Claire Phelan. As I said, it would have been easy to step away and say: ‘It is not to be’. But they are back, and you have to admire their resilience.

“But also, they’ll realise the smallest thing could have swung some of those All-Ireland finals. They were so close in 2017 and 2018. It wasn’t even a game of inches, it was a fraction of an inch in those finals. The games swung on a magnificent point from Julia White, in 2017, and that late, late Orla Cotter free in 2018.

“They were such small margins, and Kilkenny will use that as a real motivator this weekend.”