Thank the GAA for Ireland’s Women’s World Cup soccer stars

Amber Barrett puffs her cheeks and lays it out for you. By vocation a footballer, by inclination a messer – she doesn’t really do serious if she can help it. This is a rare moment of sincerity, brought on by a question that should sound pretty silly on the eve of a Women’s World Cup. Especially one that Ireland have reached on the back of her goal of a lifetime. But we ask it anyway.

Do you miss playing Gaelic, Amber?

“Aw, terribly,” comes the reply. “Aye, terribly.”

She’s genuinely not kidding. Barrett grew up in Milford in Donegal, immersed in three sports – soccer, Gaelic football and athletics. She was an All-Ireland champion runner at underage level. She played senior football for Donegal. She’s going to the World Cup. She pushed all three as far as they could be pushed until she had to start pruning back and concentrating on one. Soccer ended up being the choice.

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“I basically had to decide when Colin Bell became our international coach,” she says. “I was playing for Donegal under Michael Naughton at the time. Colin basically said to me, ‘You have a choice – do you want to play for Ireland or do you want to play for Donegal?’

“At the time, we had the Netherlands in our group for the World Cup qualifiers and he named out three or four of the world-class Dutch players and said, ‘They’re not going playing Gaelic football two nights a week’. When he laid it out like that, it was obvious really. You get an opportunity to represent your country, you’re never going to turn it down.”

Somewhere along the line, it’s a conversation and a choice plenty of this Ireland squad had to sit down and reckon with. Most of them played Gaelic football at one stage or another, some to the highest level you can get to. Even a few of the Americans got a taste – in Pennsylvania, Sinead Farrelly’s Cavan father was never going to let her away without having a go. “I played it for, like, a week,” she laughs.

Some played as kids, the way kids do. Denise O’Sullivan played football and camogie underage but neither of them sang to her in the key that soccer could. Abbie Larkin played for Clanna Gael Fontenoys in Ringsend. Louise Quinn stood in goals for the Blessington senior team at the age of 12 – she was tall even then. “But that put the fear in me,” she told The Star last year. “Grown women screaming at me!”

For others, it went a lot further than that. Ciara Grant played minor and senior for Donegal and never lost the love of it. In fact, it was a random encounter at a GAA match that brought her out of soccer retirement and led her back on the road that brought her to the World Cup.

Having walked away from an elite career to concentrate on being a doctor, she was at a Donegal match in 2019 when she ran into an FAI coach, Trevor Scanlon. “What age are you now?” he asked. “I’m 27,” she replied. “But sure players only hit their peak at 29! You should get back at it,” Scanlon said. And so she did. And here she is.

[ Ciara Grant hoping to make the leap from hospital ward to professional ranks ]

Lots of the squad come from big GAA backgrounds. Megan Connolly’s family are steeped in the Nemo Rangers club in Cork. Her brother Luke captained the men’s team to a county title last year after a seven-year Cork career. Megan did her bit with Nemo as a kid but it was College Corinthians that tugged more insistently at her coat.

“Gaelic football asks a lot of different things,” Connolly says. “A bigger pitch, for one. More running. A lot more continuous, non-stop stuff. I definitely think growing up playing a lot of different sports helped me with soccer. Also, playing soccer helped with the Gaelic football. Being a half forward, when the ball fell on the floor, I didn’t really want to pick it up. I just kind of dribbled a bit and people didn’t expect it.

“I think I was just obsessed with soccer, in the end. I loved it. I could see myself going a lot further with soccer. I could go worldwide with it. Obviously with the Gah, it is an Irish sport that is lived and breathed in Ireland, which is absolutely amazing. But for me, what enticed me more towards soccer was the travelling, playing at a professional club, getting a professional wage, actually making a living and having that as your sole job. I knew that was what I wanted from a very young age.”

[ Megan Connolly more than ready to play her part in Ireland’s cause ]

For all of them, there came a time when the juice stopped being worth the squeeze. Heather Payne played football and camogie for Pádraig Pearses in Roscommon. She played under-14 and under-16 football for Roscommon and was on the Rossie minor panel when she was still only 16. But most of all, she was coming to the attention of the Ireland underage soccer coaches.

“When you’re younger, you think you can do every sport and you’ll never get tired,” she says. I was under-16 and I got to the point where I was getting called up to the Ireland youth team in soccer and I loved it. I loved GAA too but I had this special love for soccer so I continued on with that.

“I was part of the Roscommon minor panel for a year. I couldn’t make one game, which was very disappointing for myself and for them. I would have liked to have played one game. I think that was when I realised I had to make the call – I was too busy with soccer.”

Some of them still found a way, as they got older. Niamh Fahey’s first ever Irish Times Sportswoman of the Month Award came in 2005, when she scored two goals in Galway’s All-Ireland semi-final win over Dublin. She was only 17 at the time and combined her GAA gaiscí with scoring the winner for the Ireland under-19s in a Euro qualifier against Iceland.

Fahey’s soccer career has been long and storied and is about to get its fitting capstone in Australia. But no more than Barrett, the game she grew up with is still coursing through her. Her two brothers, Richie and Gary, won All-Irelands with Galway before her but even though she chose the world of professional soccer for herself, she still found time to keep her hand in long after she signed terms.

When she was playing for Arsenal in 2011, she joined up with London club Parnells in the off-season, as much as a keep-fit option. They ended up winning the London championship and went on to parlay it into an All-Ireland intermediate club title – the first non-Irish-based team to win one. “We had a couple of games there that I probably shouldn’t have been playing in!” she laughs. “But it was great fitness and more so great crack.”

We may as well ask the silly question, so. Do you miss it, Niamh?

“Aw I do, yeah,” she says. “I do miss it. You play with your clubmates, you play with your friends who you grew up with. That’s the beauty of it. Your parish, your club, you miss that side of things. I’m very much still involved. I keep track of the Galway ladies, I watch all my club games when I’m at home, I go to the Galway games. I’m still very much involved in the GAA and I love it.

“I never really had a preference because I loved both of them. I loved soccer ever since I was a young girl playing in school. And then Gaelic was obviously in my blood. I don’t think I could actually pick between them. I love playing both so much.”

Barrett was full forward of the Donegal team that won their first ever Ulster title in 2015. That was a trailblazing team and Donegal have gone from strength to strength ever since, albeit mostly in her absence. “I was obviously holding them back,” she cracks.

But you can seal up the box all you like – a little of her rebel spirit is always liable to leak out. She hasn’t played an official game for years. An unofficial one? That’s another story.

“A few years ago when I was playing with Cologne, we had a game in Milford at Christmas,” she says. “Obviously at Christmas everybody who’s abroad comes home to Ireland and so there was a match between the home-based players and the ones who lived abroad. I joined in and played away. It was the only time I did it, to be fair – you don’t want to be going back to your club in Germany saying, ‘Aw, I picked up a knock.’ That would have been an interesting conversation.”

She’d have talked her way out of it, all the same.

The game stays the game, wherever they go.