Sam Maguire was already booked in for a year’s stay in Dublin and now he’ll have Brendan Martin for company, Carla Rowe raising the cup on Sunday that was named after the Offaly man who was one of the pioneers of women’s Gaelic football.
After a two-year hiatus, then, the Dubs are back to their All-Ireland-winning ways after beating Kerry by five points at Croke Park in front of a crowd of 45,326, the fifth highest attendance in 50 years of finals.
By Dublin’s standards, those two years had the feel of a famine, having completed a four-in-a-row before Meath knocked them off their perch. But that barren spell paled next to the one Kerry have endured, it being an entire three decades since Brendan last got to visit the Kingdom.
They can apportion a large part of the blame for their drought being extended to the shooting boots of Hannah Tyrrell whose deadly accuracy skewered them in a first half that saw her score eight of Dublin’s 11 points, the unplayable corner forward wide with just one of her efforts.
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It was the Hannah Tyrrell show. Her player of the match award rounded off a day that adds yet another chapter to one of Irish sport’s most remarkable stories.
Twelve years ago this month, Tyrrell was in the St Catherine’s soccer team that beat a Wilton United side featuring Denise O’Sullivan in the FAI Cup final.
By then she had won under-16 and under-18 All Ireland titles with Dublin ... as a goalkeeper. A decent one she was too, saving two penalties in that under-16 final against Cork.
She progressed to senior level but switched to rugby in 2014 when she was offered a full-time contract with Ireland’s Sevens set-up. She went on to play for the 15s too, part of the team that won the Six Nations’ title in 2015.
Come 2021, she retired from rugby. All done with sport? Nope. She had one more goal: to win a senior All-Ireland title. Her timing was wojous, though, just as she returned to the panel, that two-year famine kicked in.
It ended today.
A career that has seen her feast on medals has yet another one for the collection.
“I’ve never been here before, so it’s a bloody good feeling,” she beamed, but wait until she gets the bill for the extension that will be required to house her sporting gongs.
For Kerry, it was another heartbreak, coming a year after they lost to Meath in their first final in 10 years.
Louise Ní Mhuircheartaigh, playing in her 16th season of senior football, will have to continue living with the tag of ‘the greatest Kerry player yet to win an All-Ireland’.
Her tally of 1-07, much of it coming as she led the second-half fightback that, ultimately, Dublin repelled, leaves her as the championship’s top scorer this season. Her county will hope that the 32-year-old will try again next year. If ever anyone deserved that senior medal, she surely does.
She can take inspiration from Tyrrell, who was 33 last Thursday. If the Dubliner ever gets around to writing her autobiography, it’ll need to be of War and Peace proportions to squeeze in her sporting story.
