‘When you put on the Kerry jersey, all you’re thinking about is winning the All-Ireland’
Carmody has high hopes for final... and rest of the season
WHEN Kerry lost the 2022 All-Ireland ladies football final to Meath, it took time to properly process the pain of it all. It wasn’t until a Kerry team meeting the following February that the players and management sat down and watched the tape of it all back.
‘There were tears, there was laughter, there was honesty, there was criticism but I think that game has made this group,’ said joint manager Darragh Long, who shares the sideline with Declan Quill. And Kerry drove on from that point to end a long wait for the county’s 12th Division 1 League title, beating Galway in last year’s decider.
Once again, the squad have shown great resilience in bouncing back from a second successive All-Ireland final defeat, this time at the hands of Dublin last July. This time around, there has been a different approach to processing it all, as Niamh Carmody explains. Asked how players have handled it, she says: ‘Tough question. We’ve all nearly dealt with it in our own way. We watched the Meath one together the year previously, as a group. I’d say everyone has watched the Dublin game individually. I think we’re all just revved up for this year again, just put it to the side, accept it. Hoping this year we can go all the way and get another chance at competing for the All-Ireland.’
A senior player since 2017, she took a year out to go travelling before jumping back in in 2019. And her livewire performances in the Kerry attack have been such as to earn her back-to-back All-Stars as the county have won both Division 2 and Division 1 league titles in successive years.
When it is put to her that she might be tempted to swap one of those individual awards for that elusive All-Ireland medal, she has no hesitation in replying:
‘I’d swap both of them for it! It’s a nice individual honour but we play in a team sport, it would be nice to get a team All-Ireland. That’s the main goal. When you put on the Kerry jersey, that’s all you’re thinking about.’
But first things first. Tomorrow, Kerry face a resurgent Armagh side in the Lidl Division 1 league final. When the pair met in the group stage in March at the Athletic Grounds in Newry, Armagh won a high-scoring thriller by 314 to 1-13 with Aimee Mackin in superlative form. So Carmody is well aware of the challenge that is going to be presented.
‘They’ve had an excellent league campaign and been a lovely team to watch as well, they’ve played some lovely football and some of their players are just phenomenal. We learned a lot about ourselves the day we played them up in Armagh.
‘I don’t think we did ourselves any favours that day in some of the things we did – we weren’t clinical in front of goals. We were creating goal chances but just not putting them away. You’re not going to win games if you’re not converting your chances so we’ve been working on stuff that that game highlighted for us.’
There is a good chance this ladies final can follow the lead of the men’s final at Croke Park last Sunday when Derry and Dublin served up a classic. Carmody feels that the attackminded approach of both sides should make this one another tasty affair.
‘We in Kerry don’t really play defensive football and I don’t think Armagh are overly defensive either so I think it’ll be a cracking game. We try and play as free-flowing football as we can, depending on the opposition sometimes but I think it’ll be high-scoring, hopefully.’
Carmody has plenty going on between work, studying for an online degree, and time invested into Kerry football. An automation engineer at Thermo Fisher Scientific in Cork, she forms part of a carload of Kerry players based in Cork who commute twice a week to Kerry for training. The level of commitment is worth detailing.
‘After work, it’s the bones of a two-hour drive from Ringaskiddy. There’s a few of us down there. Hannah O’Donoghue works alongside me in another company. And there’s a couple of teachers and other players.
‘We’d nearly have two full cars going from Cork. We train on Wednesday and Friday evenings. We car-pool on Wednesdays. On Fridays, we’d be going home for the weekend. On Wednesdays I’d be home at 11pm or 11.30pm. Sometimes, it might be 10.30pm. It’s a long evening, but we do it because we love it.’
She admits that the level of soulsearching that needed to be done after coming up short against Dublin in last year’s All-Ireland final has to be tempered with recognition of how far this Kerry team have come. ‘It was devastating for us on the day but you just try and go away and deal with it over the winter, go away and do other life things with your friends and come back with a fresh perspective for the new year. It’s great to have competed in two All-Ireland finals. It wasn’t too long ago that we were in relegation battles, many of the team that we have now, so I think we’ve been improving steadily over the last few years.
‘We try and play as free-flowing as we can’
‘I think this is a big marker for the rest of the year’
‘This is actually our fourth league final in a row. We lost to Meath in the Division 2 final, then beat Armagh and this is a four-in-a-row.’
And she doesn’t anticipate this being any type of a phoney war ahead of the Championship?
‘Any chance to win silverware I think teams should be going for it. I do think this is an important one to win, it’s a National League final and Division 1 too, that’s something to be proud of. I also think it’s a big marker for how you expect the rest of the year to go as well.’
Then there’s the importance of being back at Croke Park for a final to create fresh memories.
‘Absolutely. It’s great to tog out at Croke Park, sure that’s what you dream of. Talking to girls as well on the panel, a lot of them haven’t played in Croke Park yet. So it will be good to get them experience of playing in Croke Park because hopefully we will be back there before the year is out.’