Rowe takes a long road to Dalyer
BEFORE she started playing with Melbourne Victory in the A League recently, Sarah Rowe reckons it had been eight years since she had consistently played top-level soccer.
There was a brief dalliance with Shelbourne two seasons ago, when she played two league games and also was involved in one of Ireland manager Vera Pauw’s home-based sessions. However, it had been a considerable time out of the game.
A former Ireland under-age star, who won three senior caps eight years ago, Rowe left Raheny United to focus all her attention on winning an All-Ireland football title with Mayo. And she nearly did it, reaching the final that season only to run into the all-conquering Dubs.
In the past few years, her sporting career has been centred on Collingwood in the AFLW, which is how the Melbourne Victory connection came about. But now she is back in Ireland, playing soccer with Bohemians. And as she gears up for tomorrow’s Dublin derby against her old club Shelbourne in Dalymount, Rowe says she always felt that she had unfinished business in the game.
‘Definitely. I always wanted to go back. It was just a case of where would I find the time. I didn’t want to up and leave Collingwood either, as we started something there and I had Gaelic in the back of my head too. So it was about getting it to align.
‘I made enquiries in Melbourne and got the opportunity to train with Victory and that was the start of it. The ball started rolling pretty quickly after that.’
It helped Rowe that the strength and conditioning coaching in both Collingwood and Melbourne Victory was connected. And she had a deep base of fitness from the AFLW. But it took time to get a degree of comfort on a football field again, having been away from it for so long.
However, she found a coach in Melbourne in Jeff Hopkins who was receptive to her and impressed by her attitude. ‘He was willing to give me a chance, which I was very grateful for.
‘I just went in and worked my socks off for the first few weeks, kept saying to the coach, give me time and be patient, I will get there. These things will come back to me. But the first few training sessions were difficult. I hadn’t forgotten how to play the game but had to re-hone my skills and rely on muscle memory of what I had known before.’
With the A League concluding in April, Rowe wanted to continue playing football and hoped to come home to do it. When she initially started making enquiries among League of Ireland clubs, she realised that she only had 48 hours to act with the transfer window about to close.
She knew Bohemians manager Seán Byrne from her Raheny days and also with the Ireland Under 19s and reached out to him. When she considered the ethos of the club, it seemed like a no-brainer to join the Gypsies.
‘It is great to come home and come to a club like Bohs, which is fan-owned and feels a bit like a GAA club in a way, a family environment, and they even collected me from the airport. You can feel the support of the club and coming from a GAA background, that is always important to me. And I knew and trust Seán as a coach, that was part of my thought process.’ While Rowe is not a professional athlete, as she was in Australia with both Collingwood and Melbourne Victory, she is training full-time. Four days a week with the boys teams in Irishtown and then with her own team-mates in the evening. ‘Six days a week, generally, and take Sunday off. For me, it is about building confidence again in my game. If I can do it in training, I can do it in games.’ And given that Rowe has previously been on Pauw’s radar through the home-based sessions, it was inevitable that she was going to be asked about her World Cup dream as she did her first interview as a Bohemians player. ‘It’s funny,’ she smiled. ‘It feels like there has been a narrative created around it but for me, it is just about reaching my potential in soccer and I am doing everything to reach my potential. I am just coming back to a sport I love and I am really passionate about. So for me, it is about working hard every day, focusing on Bohs and focusing on my training and I don’t think any further than today and tomorrow, to be honest.’ As someone coming from a professional background though, there will be a close eye kept on Rowe in the coming weeks, to see if she could add something completely different.