On a dank October night in 2017, 552 hardy souls turned up at Petershill Park to watch home side Glasgow City attempt to overturn a 3-0 first leg defeat in the Champions League. Less than 20 minutes in to the game, Kazakhstan’s BIIK Kazygurt made it 4-0 on aggregate, the battle for a place in the last 16 of the competition all but over.
Except it wasn’t: 1-1, 2-1, 3-1, 4-1, Glasgow’s young loan signing spearheading the fight back. And then she won a penalty. Were City about to do a Lazarus? No, Leanne Ross hit the post. Kazygurt went through on away goals.
From Petershill Park to Estádio José Alvalade, it’s been some journey in the competition for Katie McCabe, for it was she who was Glasgow’s driving force that 2017 night in what was her first Champions League campaign.
Whenever she looked back in subsequent years on that six month loan spell from Arsenal, she picked out her debut in the competition as the highlight. While there was never much prospect of Glasgow progressing deep in to it, she still fell in love with the Champions League. Even if, until Saturday, it only broke her heart.
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It’s unlikely that Petershill Park was on McCabe’s mind when the final whistle blew in Lisbon and she and her Arsenal comrades were European champions. But you never know. She was, after all, in a reflective mood when she spoke with TNT Sport’s Becky Ives and her former Arsenal team-mate Fara Williams, saluting the people and the phases in her career that had sent her on her way.
“When I first came to Arsenal, I was a young, naive kid who came over from Dublin. Fara, Emma Byrne, they took me under their wing right from the very start, taught me what it meant to be a professional footballer, to play for Arsenal and to play for the badge.”
Williams: “Here you are!”
McCabe: “Here I am!”
McCabe’s story isn’t just one of an immensely gifted player completing her set of big honours with the club game’s most illustrious winner’s medal.
“We bounced back, we kept going, we kept being resilient, persistent,” she said of her team’s victory over the three-in-a-row-seeking Barcelona when she talked to TNT. But she could have been speaking about herself.
The bulk of Ireland’s most talented players have joined clubs abroad down the years, the expectation being, such was their ability, that they would prosper. But a good chunk of them have returned home after a year or three, often because of a lack of playing opportunities or because the ‘professional’ life wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be. And, occasionally, because they weren’t prepared to put in the hard slog.
There could be some more returnees this summer, a sprinkling of players who lit up the domestic league failing to catch fire when they moved away.
Back in 2017, when Arsenal sent McCabe on loan to Glasgow, it looked like she might fall in to that category. “You’re going over from being a big player in Ireland, to being a small fish in a big pond,” she said of her limited chances at the London club when she arrived, manager Pedro Martínez Losa not convinced by the then 20-year-old.
When she returned from Glasgow, in the off-season, her contract was due to expire in a fortnight, so that’s how long she had to persuade Losa’s successor, Joe Montemurro, that she merited a longer stay at the club. She trained like a demon, worked harder than she had before, and Montemurro was convinced. He offered her a new contract.
It’s closing in on a decade since the big fish became a tiddler in Arsenal’s pond. Her talent has seen her through, but maybe even more than that, her resilience, persistence and sheer bloody-minded determination to succeed. It is, indeed, a long way from Petershill Park.
