All-Ireland camogie final: Waterford women poised to put an end to 78 years of hurt

During the 2009 championship, when Niamh Rockett was just 14, Waterford invited her to join them. They needed players to fill out 15-a-side training matches and, in their shallow pool, any qualms about Rockett’s age were tranquillised by her brilliance. At the time it gave her conditional status on the panel. On match days she had a jersey but no prospect of playing. That changed when she was 15. Waiting any longer would have been ridiculous.

Waterford reached the junior All-Ireland final in 2009 and Offaly beat them by nine points. A year later, they reached the final again and Antrim beat them in a replay. That was their station, locked in camogie’s third tier. Over the previous 20 years Waterford had won six senior All-Irelands in women’s football, and contested another three finals. The camogie team lived in their giant shadow, unnoticed, or seen at a glance.

Nobody else remains from the team that won the junior All-Ireland at the third attempt in 2011. Rockett stayed faithful to a road that wasn’t paved with promises. On Sunday Waterford will contest their first senior final in 78 years and, in the slipstream of that momentous breakthrough, Rockett will attempt to become the first player in the game’s history to win All-Irelands at all three adult grades: junior, intermediate and senior. Along the way there was no signpost to here; the road was blind.

“Getting over that semi-final this year meant so much, I swear,” she says. “I think we celebrated as if we were after winning an All-Ireland. People were saying it was a bit over-the-top maybe, but it just meant so much to us.”

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Nothing had come easily. After they won the intermediate All-Ireland in 2015 Waterford managed to win just one championship match in their first two seasons at senior level. In their first year Waterford’s scoring difference in the round-robin stage was minus 38; a year later it was minus 54. When they mastered qualifying from the group stages, they lost four quarter-finals in a row. All of their learning was in a hard school.

“The difference between intermediate and senior was massive. Massive. We were very green. In the early years Galway gave us a fair few beatings. Other teams gave us beatings too but I just remember Galway really, really taking us to the cleaners up in Athenry – some really heavy defeats. I think there’s still a bit of PTSD from that.”

Donal O’Rourke is coach to the Cork senior hurlers now, but he was manager of the Waterford camogie team when they found a way to stand taller. Rockett remembers a Munster championship match against Cork during O’Rourke’s time when he wanted to make a statement.

Waterford had home advantage and the manager insisted they take the game out of the familiar comforts of the WIT Arena and up to Modeligo, a small club nestled between the Knockmealdown Mountains and the Comeraghs. Winning is many things but it is an attitude first, and O’Rourke wanted them to be awkward and bolshie.

“It’s in the middle of nowhere – up hills and down hills. He organised bagpipers and he made sure there was a bit of hype for the match. He made it like a fortress. All the local people came out. That was the first time there was a really big crowd at one of our games. People really took notice. They beat us in the end but he really spurred us on.

“Donal just taught us loads. He set the foundations of professionalism in our set-up. You could get a message about camogie from Donal at 12 o’clock at night. He lived and breathed it.”

The team kept changing its skin. When Waterford won the intermediate All-Ireland in 2015 Beth Carton and Brianna O’Regan were the whizz kids, young and dauntless.

“Looking back on it now, I wish I appreciated it more,” says O’Regan. “I think it was Beth’s first year as well. I was in TY [transition year] in school and Beth was in fifth year. When you’re that age you do everything by the skin of your teeth.”

O’Regan and Carton have been close friends ever since O’Regan’s world was turned upside down. In 2006, when she was just seven, her parents, Bryan and Johanna, and her 21-month-old sister Niamh were killed in a fire at their family home. Brianna and her brothers Cian and Aaron managed to escape.

The three siblings went to live with Bryan’s parents, Patrick and Joan, around the corner from Beth. She grew up in that embrace. The Cartons were steeped in De La Salle and Brianna was taken there, by the hand. “Camogie kind of saved my life,” she said a couple of years ago. “I kind of fall back on it. I had it and it was always there for me.”

Beth was immersed in it. Her father, Joey Carton, has been a well-known coach in Waterford for decades, and he was in charge of Beth and Brianna’s team in De La Salle. For a young child there was comfort in being at the heart of something.

“I was young and at the time I didn’t know the impact [of losing my parents],” says O’Regan. “Then you get older, and these big games come along, and you see everyone with their parents... You have to get up and get on with it. Obviously you’ll have good days and bad days. On the bad days you just have to remind yourself that you have good people around you and they’re proud of you, no matter what.

[ Camogie All-Ireland final: Cork’s Ashling Thompson fighting her way back into the team after disappointment and injury ]

“It had a big impact on my life. Camogie was severely important. Just having that outlet. If you’re having a bad day you can just go out and play and forget about everything.”

Joey Carton turned her into a goalie the year they won the Féile in Waterford. She didn’t like it at the start, but as time went on she was too good to be released. This season she’s in All-Star territory.

Are they better than last year? Without question. Among other things, Annie Fitzgerald came back. She was just a teenager when she broke on to the team in 2018, and was a fixture in the starting 15 for the next three years. Then she took an Erasmus year in Cyprus as part of her linguistics degree in UL, and when she returned she committed to the Waterford footballers for a year.

Dual players have been a source of conflict in women’s Gaelic games for years, but in Waterford there was no recent history of the practice. With the blessing of the two senior managers, Fitzgerald decided to try it.

Between the LGFA and the Camogie Association the fixtures programmes are barely on speaking terms. Fitzgerald, though, was lucky. In the course of the season, there were just two head-on clashes. For the first, she went with the footballers, for the second she went with the camogie team. On both days, the other team won without her. In the middle of the season, though, there was one weekend which captures the lunatic schedule of a dual player.

“I was in Letterkenny at two o’clock on the Saturday for a football championship match, and I came down to Limerick for a camogie championship match the following day [a journey of 206 miles]. One of the girls drove me down. I was wrecked after the camogie match, but I was actually fine playing the game. The girls tell me I’m crazy.”

Until last year, Waterford hadn’t won an All-Ireland quarter-final in 63 years. In the semi-final, they led Cork with seven minutes to go and couldn’t see it through. This year, they trailed Tipperary by seven points in the semi-final, midway through the first half, and all of the strides they believed they had made under new management came under the microscope.

“We went away from our principles in the first half, and the things we’re good at,” says O’Regan. “But we had bottled the hurt from last year and said to ourselves that we can’t let it slip away from us again.”

“No one panicked,” says Fitzgerald. “We all knew what we were doing. We trusted the players around us.”

[ Waterford bridge 78-year gap to reach All-Ireland camogie final ]

Seán Power took over this year, with the former Waterford hurler Paul Flynn as part of his back room team. In hurling, Power’s reputation preceded him: he had coached Austin Gleeson’s generation to a minor All-Ireland 10 years ago, and an under-21 title three years later. Power and Flynn, though, had never managed a camogie team before. Their recruitment was seen not just as a coup, but an expression of escalated ambition.

“There’s been a massive improvement in 12 months,” says Rockett. “Everything. Everything is meticulous within our environment. We’re not left wanting for anything. Anything we want we can get.”

Rockett played when they had next to nothing: no post-training meals, no gear, no expenses, patchy medical back-up, hazy prospects. In the middle of her career she had every reason to quit. Her knee caved in and it took three surgeries to put it back together. After 14 months she had to learn to run again. That was eight years ago.

She kept going. Fifteen years. Now this. Imagine.