Westmeath’s Laura Walsh back where she belongs after rugby stint

When Laura Walsh peels off a football sock from her right foot – her kicking foot – she unveils a tattoo with a symbol that translates into "older brother". It sits there as a permanent reminder of her only brother, Mike, and reinforces an awareness about "why you're doing what you're doing and who you're doing it for".

There is also the eternal hope Mike’s spirit will bring her luck on the pitch. And after she won an All-Ireland intermediate title with Westmeath, her father Charlie slapped his daughter on the back and said, “He watched over you today.”

During their youth, Mike and Laura enjoyed pastimes like basketball, and “chilling out”, interspersed with the occasional episode of “beating lumps out of each other”.

But as the only children in the Walsh household, those simple rituals changed the dynamic of their relationship and created a bond more commonly shared between twins than that of a brother and sister born one year apart.

In the years since Mike’s death, the younger sister feels like half of herself has disappeared from her life. “Mike was born in March and I was born the following April,” she begins, “so there was no gap between us. When we were growing up, it was always us in the back yard.

“We had a family wedding recently and when I was talking to my cousin, I was saying that events like that are a constant reminder that he’s gone, or sometimes you look around the table and think about where he would be sitting if he was there.”

Mike died following a battle with depression in 2005 but it’s only in recent months that the secondary school teacher has started to speak openly about her brother’s death in front of her parents.

She agreed to take part in a video called 'BehindThePlayer' with the WGPA, assuming that the project would focus on her recent return to football after a spell of playing for the Irish rugby sevens team. But in the three-minute piece, Walsh recalls the memory of her brother and talks about how she sought refuge in football after his death.

“It was never an intention to make it as emotional as it came across,” she says, “but it was very hard to have a camera crew in your house and not acknowledge the pictures of your brother on the wall. It was hard to speak about it, but it was the truth, and the video was done respectfully and in really good taste.”

Influx of messages

The video was published in April, sending Walsh’s social media networks into overdrive with the influx of messages. She didn’t anticipate it, but she found herself connecting with strangers and her students in Cabinteely Community School, who were moved by her story.

“I remember coming out of a training session and my phone erupted. I probably never really expected it to get the attention that it did get. But it was so positive and there’s been so many people who I don’t know who have reached out and that’s really touching.

“My students told me they had seen it and were sharing it among themselves. They saw a side of me that I would probably have never portrayed to them in the classroom and that was a little bit difficult but it was quite empowering to hear them say they were proud of me.”

Walsh has always had an affinity with sport and spent her early years lobbing balls over the wall to her cousins, while her father, Charlie, sought to bring his daughter out for a kick-about “any chance he could get”.

She remembers thinking “I’d like some of that”, while watching the Westmeath women’s compete with Dublin in Croke Park, and is well versed about the strong tradition of ladies football in the county that stretches back to the 1980s.

By the age of 15, Walsh was a member of the Westmeath senior football team, and now she’s at the forefront of a renaissance, which has delivered an All-Ireland intermediate title for the midlanders following a replay against Cavan in 2011.

“You spend your teenage years going to Croke Park and hoping that you might get that chance.

“We owe Wicklow and New York a lot there because only for their drawn game, we might not have gotten back to Croke Park for the replay, so to win it in Croke Park was huge.”

That All-Ireland victory earned Westmeath promotion from intermediate to senior, and five years on they are still profiting from that upgrade. They featured in last year’s Leinster final against Dublin, where they lost out by seven points, but that was without Walsh’s assistance in attack. They’ve also appeared in two Division Two national league finals since 2014.

The senior Leinster championship has adopted a new round-robin format this year and, after three outings, Westmeath are looking towards their second successive provincial decider in July.

Flourished

They’re not the only team that has flourished since transitioning into the senior ranks. Donegal and Armagh both won senior provincial titles after making the jump in 2010 and 2012 respectively.

Meanwhile, Cavan have just recently qualified for their first senior Ulster final since 1977, almost three years after claiming an All-Ireland intermediate crown.

The idea of a second-tier championship in the men’s game was floated but the suggestion never gained legs and Walsh cannot understand why this was the case.

“It was something I was quite surprised about. I suppose there is the status of being involved in a senior intercounty team, but speaking as someone who has played through the ranks, there are huge benefits in playing teams that are at your level, week in week out and that you’re having competitive matches against.

“At the end of the day, if you had asked me if an intermediate title is any less significant, I would say absolutely not. I won an All-Ireland in Croke Park with my team-mates and that was huge. There’s huge disparity in the men’s game and it baffles me that they didn’t go for something like that,” she says.

Opportunity

Irish rugby coaches were keen to recruit Walsh for the sevens team after watching her perform at a Gaelic football tournament.

Knowing the opportunity was unlikely to come around again, she dropped out of football and accepted the invitation to switch to rugby, where she went on to enjoy a rich career in the sport.

But 10 caps later and no longer able to integrate her rugby commitments with work, Walsh withdrew from rugby and returned to the Westmeath footballers, who were happy to welcome her back.

In truth, she pined for football throughout her absence. But while her passion never diminished, reversing back into the groove required some reskilling.

“I missed football. When I did finish, I got in contact with Westmeath and I’m so thankful they welcomed me back at the end of last season. Those couple of weeks of training were vital for me to get hand-eye co-ordination back. Things like kick-passing, hand-passing and the ball coming at you rather side to side. It’s amazing how rusty I was. I was like a rugby player trying to play football again.

“I really enjoyed the high performance in rugby but I did feel like I had come home a bit again in Westmeath. These are my team-mates who I’ve played with for the last 10 years. These are the girls who have seen me through probably the worst times of my life and it was lovely coming back.”