Gaelic Games

Louise Ní Mhuircheartaigh named Sportswoman of the Month for August

The Kerry star is no longer the greatest player never to have won an All-Ireland

Louise Ní Mhuircheartaigh is lifted with the Brendan Martin cup after Kerry ended their 31-year wait for All-Ireland glory. Ben Brady/Inpho
Louise Ní Mhuircheartaigh is lifted with the Brendan Martin cup after Kerry ended their 31-year wait for All-Ireland glory. Ben Brady/Inpho
Mary Hannigan
Sat Sept 14 2024 - 06:00

The bulk of our sporting focus this summer might well have been on Paris, where a number of the names on our 2024 roll of honour did exceedingly special things at the Olympics and Paralympics, not least medallists Kellie Harrington, Mona McSharry and Róisín Ní Riain. And you’d have a notion that a certain Katie-George Dunlevy might just be in the running for the September award after her multiple achievements.

But it’s probably just as well that each sportswoman can only win one monthly award in the year, otherwise, after the 2024 some of them have enjoyed, there wouldn’t be room on their mantelpieces for all the trophies.

Back on August 4th, though, Kerry folk only had eyes for Croke Park, where the county was attempting to end a senior All-Ireland football drought that stretched all the way back to 1993. It was then that they won their 10th title in 12 years, only Waterford managing to remove the Brendan Martin Cup from its nigh-on permanent residence in the Kingdom during that spell.

Louise Ní Mhuircheartaigh was only two when her Kerry elders beat Laois on that 1993 day, so she might have been more preoccupied with her Wendy House, Fuzzy Felt and Liga than their latest triumph. But soon enough she had a ball in her hands and such was her talent, and such was Kerry’s invincibility, that she would have been expected to have amassed a mountain of All Ireland medals by 30-odd years on . But when she took to the field in the final in August, she had none.

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In the three decades since 1993, Cork, Dublin, Mayo, Waterford, Monaghan, Laois, Galway and Meath had all won senior titles, Kerry’s star having well and truly fallen. They had only reached three finals since then, losing to Cork in 2012, Meath in 2022 and Dublin last year.

Did you ever come close to saying, ‘I’ve had enough of this heartache?’

“Oh, God, yeah,” says Ní Mhuircheartaigh, the 2023 footballer of the year and four-time All-Star. “I remember us getting beaten badly one time by Dublin in a quarter final or something, and I was on the phone to my brother and his wife. I just said, ‘I don’t think we’ll ever do this, we’ll never get over the line’. They told me to keep the faith and stick with it, but yeah, there were times you’d have had your doubts, like it was never meant to be.”

By then, she had been lumbered with the tag of the greatest player never to win an All-Ireland. “But I didn’t really pay much heed to that, I wouldn’t be too good with the old bit of praise,” she says with a laughs. “And there are a lot of players who have never got their hands on an All-Ireland medal when you’d feel they deserved one. But look, they don’t come easy.”

She kept that faith, though, and when Darragh Long and Declan Quill took over as co-managers in 2020 “we knew there was something different and something special about them”. The defeats to Meath and Dublin prolonged the agony, but Ní Mhuircheartaigh was convinced this Kerry team’s day would come. So she signed up for her 17th consecutive season in 2024, having made her senior debut as a 16-year-old back in 2008.

“It was tough to come back, but we just did it as a group and we promised each other that we’d dig deeper than we’d ever dug before. But we were up against a Galway team that had beaten Dublin, the reigning champions, and Cork on the way to the final, so we knew it would be tough. But the management team had done unbelievable work on matchups in every single game we played this year, so we felt well prepared.”

By half-time, they were eight points up, five of them coming from the boot of Ní Mhuircheartaigh in the space of 11 minutes. “It was just a dream of a performance by everyone,” she says. Kerry’s management team took her off in the closing moments, by which time the game was won, so the 30,340 crowd had a chance to salute her. And that they did. Heartily.

For one who doesn’t like praise, she couldn’t get off the pitch quick enough. “I think I ran as fast as I’ve ever run, the only thing I wanted to do was to give Darragh and Declan a hug, I couldn’t wait to get into their arms. They brought us over the line. We owe them everything. I just cherished the moment. Emma Dineen had just stuck the ball in the net for our third goal and we felt ‘God, we have actually done it’. So to be able to enjoy the last few minutes, just soak it all up, countdown to the buzzer ... yeah, it’s something I’ll never forget.”

“All the heartbreak and the losses were forgotten about. Everything all of us had put into it felt worth it when that final whistle went. Players have come and gone and we lost some special ones along the way, like Emma Costello and Louise Galvin. But they were still part of our journey. We did it for them as much as we did it for ourselves. The bond we all have is very close, we’re like a family.”

Are you still on cloud nine?

“Oh, God, we are, yeah. And I doubt we’ll come down from it for a while yet.”

So now you’re the greatest player with an All-Ireland medal?

“Ah stop.”

Previous monthly winners – December: Fionnuala McCormack; January: Lucy Mulhall; February: Mona McSharry; March: Rachael Blackmore; April: Róisín Ní Riain; May: Rhasidat Adeleke; June: Ciara Mageean; July: Kellie Harrington.

Mary Hannigan

Mary Hannigan

Mary Hannigan is a sports writer with The Irish Times