“I saw an article online that was doing rankings of us all [after the China match in February] and it made me think that I’d rather be a 10 or zero then be a four or five. I’d rather be someone that played really well or tried really hard and failed terribly than someone who looked like they were going through the motions. For as long as I have the opportunity to put on a green shirt, I will never ever go through the motions. Everything will be on the line for the country.”
It is this attitude that has brought Manchester United player Aoife Mannion from her second ACL injury to reaching out to Vera Pauw about being available for Irish selection. A year on, she’s back playing, Manchester United are currently sitting at the top of the Women’s Super League and she is about to get her second Irish cap against the USA in Texas, with the hope of being on the plane to the World Cup in Australia this summer.
Despite the predicted pressure of being mere months out from a World Cup, and potentially being part of the first Irish women’s team to get there, Mannion felt calm before her debut.
“I had this unusual sense of confidence,” she explains. “For everyone that gets on to the pitch, there are a squad of players equally desperate to represent their family, make them proud and represent their country. So coming in from the outside, it wasn’t lost on me that I’d come in and just got in the starting line-up so I really felt a sense of responsibility to make good on how lucky and fortunate I was to be given a chance just off the back like that.”
Being chosen is one thing, delivering is another.
“To come in from the outside and to start, you need to actually make good on that. You need to make sure that first and foremost all of the team-mates on the pitch can look at you and say ‘okay, she gives everything’. If people might have opinions on performance or style, that’s one thing, what I will always hope is that people will say ‘she left everything on the pitch’.”
It was a dream debut, with an elated Mannion only coming off in the 76th minute, her longest playing time since the injury.
“I was surprised with how much I enjoyed the game. I think that putting on that jersey made me a better version of myself on the pitch than I am usually, I just was so excited and whatever that feeling was I want to bottle that up and have that every time I play.”
“I don’t know if it was my mum or my dad who said ‘we think you did well’ and I said ‘you sound really surprised’,” laughs Mannion. “Obviously with the injury they’ve not seen me play live since January 2022, so there was probably a sense in their heads – whether they would admit it or not – that all the family, their fellow country people were going to be tuning in to watch their daughter. They were probably just hoping like ‘oh, she’s had some media attention. We hope that she actually steps up to the plate. We hope all the speculation around her being in this camp comes into a nice fruition in terms of looking okay on the pitch’ and so I think my parents are quite relieved as well.”
Giving 100 per cent to the game sometimes happens off the pitch: being the proof of professionalism and bringing girls into the game where they weren’t before.
“I’ve stumbled into grassroots football, I didn’t think that I’d get that much joy from it but I’ve sorta found myself seeking it a little bit more. I don’t know whether it’s because as you get a bit older maybe you have more capacity to look outside yourself and see football as like not something that could just positively affect my life but also other people’s lives as well. It’s something I’m quite drawn to at the moment.”
[ Vera Pauw praises Aoife Mannion’s ‘toughness’ Opens in new window ]
Over Christmas, Mannion was visiting family In Ireland and she led sessions in Renmore AFC and Moyne Villa, both Co Galway, where her cousins play. The Renmore AFC account tweeted that the last time Mannion visited in 2018, the club had five girls playing but in 2022, there were 130.
When Mannion was growing up, “you couldn’t stand in front of kids and say ‘look if you dedicate your life to this then this could actually be your job’, whereas that’s the case now, so I don’t take it for granted that I can have that effect on people.”
She is also involved with a club in Davenham, Cheshire after chatting to someone at the village fete. There are about 55 kids playing in the club at the moment, and Mannion is optimistic about the team going forward.
[ Aoife Mannion: ‘I had an Irish passport before I had an English one’Opens in new window ]
“I went round to all of the local schools to recruit kids because there was no girls team, like obviously they already had a boys team. It was off the back of the Lionesses success in the Euros. That’s actually another nice thing about football, it doesn’t matter who the kids’ inspiration is. What really matters is that the girls make that connection and then just want to play football. If it’s going to be Lionnesses, take that inspiration for the kids, if it’s going to be Ireland in the lead-up to this summer, take it.”
