I loved playing. It was a special time in my life

JOANNE CANTWELL PART OF AN IRISH SUMMER NOW

A MAN held the door open and the host of Sunday Game walked into the cafe.

“Can I get you something to drink?” an old friend asked.

“I’ll have a latte,” Joanne Cantwell said.

The room was filled with the sound of coffee machines whirring, cups clinking, voices murmuring.

Cantwell then walked to the table her friend had picked out, and chose to sit facing the window, away from the crowd, her friend unsurprised by the subtlety of her choice.

Years ago, when they first worked together, Joanne double jobbed as full-back and Press Officer for the Dublin Ladies football team. She was 18, studying journalism in college, and clearly going places. So was that Dublin team. They won their first ever senior Championship game that summer, reached a Leinster final, their full-back nominated for an All Star.

EXCLUSIVE

She was a big player but not the team’s loudest voice and on the bus home from away matches, she sat at the front while those at the back cracked open cans, sang songs and told jokes.

Answer

“Why was I a front-of-thebus person?” Cantwell asks before pausing for a few seconds to consider her answer.

“I was quiet, I was the youngest, I didn’t drink. I enjoyed everything that was going on without feeling the need to be in the centre of it. But being on that team, I loved it. It was a special time in my life.”

Memories flood in. There was the pain of a defeat to Meath, the belief and the nicknames their manager, Alan Byrne, gave them, the pleasant warmth and feeling of being part of something.

If there is a reason why she can instantly recall specific moments from a match or a training session from a quarter of a century ago, it is because the goodness of people always survives in the rubble of all the bad things you have to endure trekking through adulthood.

It all began to change for her in May 1999.

When she walked into a college lecture, she saw an ad.

FM104 needed someone to read their Saturday sports bulletins. She got in a taxi and went home, recorded a tape and went straight to their studios with it.

That weekend she got her break, and in an instant, her old life ended and her new one began.

“As a kid, I remember watching Grandstand, Sports Stadium,