Louise Quinn and Stephanie Roche might have been forgiven for retiring to the green room in RTÉ to drown their sorrows in a vat of brandy rather than stick around for panel duty for Saturday’s Germany v Sweden quarter-final. After all, for a chunk of the previous three weeks much of the chat had been about Ireland’s aspirations to reach the level of the teams they’d been watching at the World Cup, and how progress was being made on that front under the guidance of Colin Bell. And with that came the news: he was off to Huddersfield.
Quarter-final previewing was, then, put on pause to give Quinn and Roche a chance to react to the news and you sensed from their disappointment that their international careers must feel like a permanent case of one step forward, half a dozen back.
But as Quinn told Peter Collins, the players have long since become accustomed to dealing with challenges, not least those changing-out-of-tracksuits-in-airport-loos days, although their powers of bouncebackability must be close enough to being stretched to the limit by now.
Collins’ chat with Bell by phone towards the end of the day’s coverage wouldn’t have soothed their frustration, what with his claim that he would have stayed in the job if he’d been allowed expand his role to “grow” the women’s game in Ireland. Alas, there the coverage ended, so we were deprived of the pair’s reaction to that particular revelation.
Should the players be consulted about Bell’s successor, Collins asked Quinn. Yes, came the reply, although Collins conceded that the mere notion of players being asked to express an opinion about who should manage them would bring most administrators out in a rash.
A certain level of insanity, though, would be required to resist asking Quinn, especially, for her opinion, her being one of the most powerful and impressive voices in women’s sport since the days when she captained Peamount United to the inaugural Women’s National League, back in 2012, before setting sail to play semi-professionally for Eskilstuna in the Swedish league.
Her experiences there, as well as those with her current club Arsenal, have made her voice an absorbing one, and having played with and/or against a whole bunch of the players doing their thing at the World Cup, her insight has been mighty. Like on the legend that is Brazil’s Marta, who she played against in Sweden.
“She was pretty much everything you thought she was going to be – skilful, left foot, right foot, head, free-kicks. I got in hard on her with one tackle and in Swedish she managed to call me a tall loser.”
Tall loser
Until the France v USA quarter-final Alex Scott was joint first with the tall loser in the pundits’ hit parade, but then Scott was docked a mark for objecting at half-time to Gabby Logan highlighting two instances of diving. “Showing these clips is taking away from what a spectacle this game has been,” she said, like it’s the broadcaster’s duty to sanitise the spectacle and persuade viewers that girl players can’t possibly be as unscrupulous as some of the lads.
No matter, all in all it’s been a blast of a tournament, and aside from confidently forecasting that Norway, France, Italy and Germany would fill the semi-final slots, only for them to be taken by England, the USA, the Netherlands and Sweden, the crystal ball has been working impeccably.
Gráinne Walsh, meantime, had a blast at the European Games in Minsk where she won a bronze medal in the welterweight division, although the announcer for the medal ceremony, as well as the BT commentator, reckoned she was called “Grainy”.
What they need is a lesson from the star of BBC Northern Ireland’s fir fáinne, Paddy Barnes now the proud possessor of a Fáinne Airgid for reaching “a good level of spoken Irish”.
And Paddy had started from a low enough base. “That’s a man – you see it on the toilets,” he said when he studied a card that displayed the word mna. He had, then, possibly spent the bulk of his life entering ladies’ loos in Belfast.
His progress was swift, though, him even able to deal with his daughter’s query about the meaning of the word oraiste. “Carl Frampton,” he told her of the self-described “Protestant from Tiger’s Bay” who turned up at the party to celebrate Paddy passing his Fáinne Airgid exam.
His wife Mari was proud as, well, punch.
“I’ll teach you Irish,” he said to her.
“I’ll teach you English,” she replied.
“Fair enough,” said Pádraic.
