Galvin popped the lid on bottled-up Kerry emotion

Kerry's Anna Galvin celebrates after with Síofra O'Shea after winning the All-Ireland ladies senior football final. Picture: ©INPHO/Ben Brady

The elation was that real Anna Galvin welled up with time still left on the clock.

As Emma Dineen put Kerry’s glory beyond doubt with a 55th-minute goal, her midfielder team-mate was struggling to control her emotions.

“I was bawling, I was bawling!” she laughed. “It was class. Do you know, for me, when the third goal went in I actually nearly started crying on the pitch. I was like, 'Anna, there's still four minutes left in this game, where the hell is your player?!'

“And then Louise Ní Mhuircheartaigh obviously went off to a rapturous crowd, deservedly so. That's iconic. So delighted for her as well. So yeah, a little bit of emotion, probably teetering over the edge even before the final whistle but we probably had the wiggle room at that stage so it was okay. But yeah, just floods (of tears).” 

For this team, it was third time lucky in a final, but for the likes of Galvin, Ní Mhuircheartaigh, Cáit Lynch and Lorraine Brosnan victory came at the fourth time of asking.

“My very first year in we got to the All-Ireland, was it 2012? We lost obviously (to Cork) but I was like, 'Jeez, this is cool, we're going to be in All-Irelands all the time'. And you don't realise how hard they are to come by.

“You have to be able to react to tough situations on every game day, that's hard to do day in, day out, for quarter-finals, semi-finals, it's tough to be consistently able to win. It's not an easy thing to do and I hope that we can back it up now over the years coming. We have lots of young girls in the panel.

“Even though the lads were kind of saying that this will probably be their last year and stuff like that, they were never not bringing in new fresh blood and things like that.” 

The experience of those harrowing losses to Meath and Dublin the last couple of years counted on Sunday, Galvin felt. “The first year (2022) we got there it was very emotional altogether. We kind of toned that down a little bit last year and we cut it out this year altogether.

“There was just no emotions, it was very much 'next game, let's get a job done here'. And I think we needed that because I suppose the energy, you don't realise how sapping that is. And now having gone onto the pitch with all that extra energy, that we didn't have in other years maybe, yeah, it was probably a better approach for us.” 

The changes made this season included less talking and sticking to their own company. Galvin said: “I suppose in previous years we might have had more team meetings and I suppose it's done around All-Irelands but we might have had, like, messages from home and videos and stuff, and things like that in the hotel the day before and maybe spending a bit too much time with supporters or family or, you know, people who were maybe not very close to us but were slightly outside the circle a little bit.

“As much as it's so well-intentioned, it's tiring. All those bits and pieces are tiring. You don't realise it at the time but when you can take a step back from that a little bit it definitely helped us a little bit.” 

Reviewing the year, the Southern Gaels clubwoman felt winning the county’s first provincial title in seven years was considerable. “Munster was a massive one. We just got over Cork.

“I think probably some of us do have a little bit of a bugbear with Cork, as in of old, but then so many of that team don't, and it was probably just a small group of the older girls that do. So it was nice for us.” 

And to go ahead of Cork at the top of the All-Ireland roll of honour once more, 12 titles to their neighbour’s 11? “Stunning!”