IN ALL FAIRNESS - Ladies to the fore

What a last seven days it has been for women’s sport in this country! At both home and abroad, it has been the ladies who have provided the great moments of sporting achievement and in the long term have provided role-models for young girls to look up to.

The 20x20 campaign may well have drawn to a close last year and did achieve many of its aims such as creating a greater profile for women’s sport, particularly in the media, from where individual team sports can grow.

We in the Nenagh Guardian would like to think we have long been setting the agenda in terms of promoting women’s sport, particularly our coverage of camogie, going back to the late nineties under the late former editor Gerry Slevin. I would like to think we have taken it on further over the last twenty years with more coverage of club games, greater coverage of ladies football, despite the majority of the inter-county players coming from south of the county but as I always say, anyone who wears a blue and gold jersey represents the entire county, not just certain parts of it.

On top of that we now have coverage of the new ladies soccer league in North Tipperary for the first time this year, and in terms of individual sports, athletes such as Aisling Keller and Sharlene Mawdsley have competed strongly at international level and provide young sailors and runners in the local area a strong role model as they were young once and dreamed of getting to where they are now.

However, nothing beats achievement in terms of putting women’s sport to the forefront and we have gotten that in spades in recent times. Starting last month with the Olympic Games where the Women’s 4’s brought home bronze in the rowing, and Kellie Harrington following in the steps of Katie Taylor by winning Olympic Gold.

Not only are Taylor and Harrington talented boxers, they are two hugely likeable and humble people; ideal role-models, not just for any aspiring young female boxer who might be in St Paul’s Boxing club in Nenagh or other clubs in the area, but all sports in general.

They were added to by the medals won by Ellen Keane, Nicole Turner, Katie George-Dunleavy & Eve McCrystal in the Paralympics, the true epitome of a role-model as not even a physical disability can stop you achieving what you want if you put your mind to it.

Golf in the main has been the domain of men. Even the word golf has been construed by some as “G-ents O-nly L-adies F-orbidden”. Thankfully, that mantra has been broken down, with Golf proving to be one of the more inclusive sports. However, at elite level, Ireland has struggled to produce world class female players to go with the likes of Christy O’Connor Senior, Fred Daly, Padraig Harrington, and most recently Rory McIlroy and Shane Lowry, have been in the men’s game.

However, Leona Maguire is now the trailblazer for women’s golf in Ireland that they have been looking for. We have heard of her since the age of twelve when she and her twin sister Lisa first came to prominence after winning the Under 12 World Championship.

Leona Maguire’s performance in winning 4 ½ points out of five in Europe’s Solheim Cup victory will go down as the stuff of legend, particularly as she did it as a first-timer in the women’s version of the Ryder Cup. It some ways, we shouldn’t be surprised considering she is a mature rookie, at the age of 27. However, she took the longer route to international elite level golf by completing her studies at Duke University before committing fully to the LPGA Tour for the first time in 2019. She took the long route to the top but it could well be the right one in terms of her long term career and her trajectory should see her win a ladies major in the very near future.

However, Meath’s success in winning the All-Ireland Senior Ladies Football title will go down in legend. It rarely happens that a team can immediately go from winning a second tier competition to capturing the top tier competition the following year. Not only that, to win it they took down not just any team, but a Dublin team going for five-in-a-row.

Meath’s success will have been closely observed here in Tipperary who only two short years ago defeated the Royals in an All-Ireland Intermediate Final. Since then, Meath have gone from strength to strength while Tipperary have stood still, admittedly not helped by bad luck in terms of injuries and key players being unavailable for periods in the league and championship. Not only that, there has been a managerial change from Shane Ronayne to Declan Carr which did not work, despite the Carr’s best intentions so the next appointment by the Tipp LGFA will be huge as the talent is there for Tipperary to be a challenger at senior level in the years to come.