PRIOR TO THE 2014 All-Ireland final, Cork footballer Deirdre O’Reilly had this message for the Dublin football team — their opponents for the decider:
“We won’t die down, we’ll fight to the bitter end and I hope they’re prepared for that.”
It was intended to just be a sign-off for a TG4 documentary that was made before the game, but it turned out to be a prophetic call to arms.
We all know the chronological order of extraordinary events that followed.
Dublin soared into what looked to be an insurmountable lead.
10 points up with 15 minutes to go, Cork’s house was half burnt down. Their title defence was all but quashed and the Leinster side were smelling blood.
But Cork made the insurmountable mountable, and executed one of the greatest comebacks ever witnessed in Croke Park.
The mystery remains however, as to how Cork managed to do it.
The recently retired O’Reilly, proffers an insight into how it all happened.
While Cork were on the receiving end of a hiding, O’Reilly was having an important conversation with some of her teammates.
“I remember myself, Angela (Walsh) and Bríd (Stack) just pulled together in the back-line and said, ‘there is gonna be no more scores for them whether we win this or not, we’re not getting hammered,’” O’Reilly tells The42.
They went down and got two more points, but then we got a goal and I suppose it gave us that little bit of hope, and we pushed on. It all went right for us for the last 10 minutes and it went wrong for Dublin, and (we) pulled it out of the bag… again.”
Dealings with the media are not a comfortable fit for O’Reilly. It’s not impossible to extract some interviews with her in the Google machine, but they’re not in rich abundance either.
It’s the primary reason why, throughout her 15-years with the Cork senior panel, she went somewhat unnoticed compared to her better known teammates like Breige Corkery, Rena Buckley and Bríd Stack.
But she was there for all 11 of Cork’s senior All-Ireland victories. And she played through some of the barren years that preceded the good times as well.
She held back from the media stuff, because she wanted to keep her business strictly on the pitch.
And what about the aforementioned TG4 documentary?
“There was a bit of a toss up of who was the last one who really, really didn’t want to do it and hadn’t done anything before, so I was like, “right, I haven’t done anything, I’ll do it.”"
It’s just two weeks since she confirmed her inter-county retirement to Ephie Fitzgerald, and she’s obliged this writer the request to reflect on her time with Cork.
At the moment, she’s happy with her decision to step away. She went to see Cork play last week and felt the familiar urge to be out on the field with her teammates.
A human reaction of course, but not enough to convince her that she should reconsider.
O’Reilly is a fitness instructor who runs her own business, and that’s her main priority now. It’s a profession that blended well with her sporting life and allowed her to keep her own fitness in check on the occasions when she couldn’t attend training.
But trying to balance her time between the two projects was difficult at times.
“Running your own business is time-consuming and playing with Cork is as well. Sometimes you’ve got a game up the country and you’ve to take the whole day off.
“You’ve to try and find someone to cover the work you’re supposed to be doing as well.”
As retirements in sport go, O’Reilly made the perfect exit. She steps away as an 11-time All-Ireland champion with Cork, has five ladies football All-Stars, and was a regular starting player along the way.
It’s a nice way to sign off, but Cork ladies football wasn’t always in such a healthy state. The early days of O’Reilly’s inter-county career were bleak, and they promised bleaker ones to come.
She was just 15 when she was summoned from the stands during a Munster championship game against Waterford, and asked to make her senior debut.
That just speaks for itself,” she recalls, “that’s where Cork ladies football was at the time. People didn’t have the interest at senior (level.) The underage at the time was very good and was getting good. The clubs in Cork were good at the time.
“At the time, there was just no organisation. No-one really wanted to take it over properly and I suppose things came to a head in 2004 when Mary Collins, Eamonn Ryan and Frank Honohan took it over.
“They just got 30 or 40 players to come in and started putting good training sessions together, and it just went from there really.”
Cork reached their first of eleven All-Ireland finals in 2005, but O’Reilly, who had struggled with an injury during the season, wasn’t named in the starting 15. It was a blow to her confidence, but she vowed to be ready if the call came for her introduction.
Her wish was granted after half-time and she played her part in her county’s first All-Ireland victory on the senior stage. But the experience instilled a defiance in her, that she would never have the sub’s shirt again if she could help it.
Keeping every player pleased in a squad is a difficult trick for any manager to master, but Ryan had a system in place that assessed everyone fairly.
“You’re always going to have disappointed players,” O’Reilly explains, “but I suppose in the league, Eamonn was fair. Everybody got a run in the league and everybody got started at some stage. Everybody got their opportunity and if you took it, you’d be looked at again the next week.
“If you didn’t take it, it was your own fault in a way and you just had to work that little bit harder at training.
Drills at training, he’d be looking at everybody so it was kind of up to yourself to make yourself work hard and be seen, and keep your place.”
Injury struck O’Reilly again in 2014, when she developed a hip problem that required surgery. She played on with it before having the procedure done at Christmas, and took inventive measures to manage the injury.
“We use to use the ice baths at training and I found they were really good. After I got injured, I didn’t have an ice bath at home so the river was the next best thing. I use to go down to the river after training and sit in it for 10 minutes and go home then.”
These are just the early days of retirement for O’Reilly, but so far, there’s no sense of regret, or an indication that she might reverse her decision further down the road.
Her former Cork teammate Juliet Murphy retired from the squad in June 2013, and returned for a second stint later that summer. But O’Reilly is confident that that won’t be her fate.
She’s happy to bow out. And happy to be hauling 11 All-Ireland medals behind her.
“I don’t really miss going to training and I think I just had enough really. I suppose if you don’t miss it, then you made the right choice and you were right to leave.
“I just can’t believe that it’s been so long and that we’ve 11 All-Irelands. It is kind of unbelievable. When you look back, we’ve had some brilliant years. But it just doesn’t seem like it went on for that long. It flew.”
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