ONE WEEK BEFORE the 2003 Ladies All-Ireland semi-final between Galway and Mayo, word of a 15-year-old girl on the rise was reaching the Tribeswomen camp.
Niamh Fahey was good with a ball either at her feet or in her hands, they said.
“Let her come in,” then-Galway manager PJ Fahy advised, curious to see what the youngster could do, but mindful that it would take a lot of ability to make an impression on a Galway team who had won the All-Ireland junior final the year before.
Not to mention that they were also facing a Mayo side who were the dominant outfit in Ladies Football during that era. Since 1999, they had won four out of five All-Ireland titles.
Any newcomers to the Galway squad this late in the day would need bundles of quality to stand out. But worth a spin anyway.
Nobody knew what was to come from this youngster from Killanin. The prospect of a first-ever appearance at a World Cup with Ireland, or that she would captain her favourite team Liverpool one day, wasn’t even a thought at the time.
So when the semi-final against their provincial enemies rolled around, Fahy gave the young teen her chance and started her at corner-forward.
Mayo won narrowly won after extra-time and booked their place in the All-Ireland final, but Fahey had made an undeniable impression and scored 1-2 in defeat.
Most managers abide by the open-door policy. But it’s not common practice to fast-track an untested player so drastically from their first introduction. Fahey was a different case. Her undeniable talent made it a straightforward call.
“Not one person in the panel objected,” PJ Fahy tells The 42 about his gutsy call to start Fahey in that game. A cub thrown in with the wolves.
“It didn’t bother her. You’d think she was there five years.
“Normally you couldn’t do that because people on the fringes of the team wouldn’t be happy about it, but not one of them gave out about it. She just stood out. There were a lot of people giving out to me for picking a child. We lost but we could have won it and Niamh played a big part in that.
“I think she has turned out to be some child.”
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Fahy doesn’t fly. He used to, of course, and travelled all over the world when he was a confident flyer. But then he had a particularly bumpy ride in 1997, which made him swear off going anywhere by plane again. He has issues with claustrophobia too, which doesn’t help. They call it an irrational fear, which seems unfair considering how easy it actually is to rationalise all of it.
Fahy and Fahey have kept in close contact throughout the years, and when she was set to make her 100th senior cap for Ireland in Spain last year, he promised her he’d be there. Fahey was going to hit her century mark during the 2022 Pinatar Cup, meaning he would have to tense up and face the overhead bins and the squashed-up seats with no foot room again.
“We went for a week and it was brilliant,” he says summing up the experience. “It was a huge achievement.”
The pair won an All-Ireland senior title together with Galway in 2004, and they’ve continued to be close friends in the years that passed. Even when she left the GAA path for a career in professional football, the bond never frayed. Through her stints at Arsenal, Bordeaux, Chelsea and Liverpool, Fahy would be on the other end of the phone.
“There hasn’t been a month in the last 20 years that I didn’t talk to Niamh Fahey,” says her former mentor. “Especially when she went over in the beginning, you can imagine she was about 18 and was leaving a very close family to go over to London. There would have been a bit of homesickness there. I made it my business for the first couple of months she was over there to have a chat to her. It meant a lot to her at the time and we’ve always kept in touch.”
Those conversations were all the more important to Fahey during times of injury, and she has been struck by a few rotten setbacks in her time. Among the lowlights were a cruciate tear in 2013 which interfered with her time at Arsenal, and more recently, there was calf trouble causing a potential threat to her World Cup ambitions. A misdiagnosis of a tear on the muscle left her sweating at the start of 2023. But she’s in Australia now, having banked some crucial game time to stamp her passport to the World Cup.
“I had plenty of conversations with her when she was out with injury,” says PJ Fahy.
“And if anyone was going to make it back, it was going to be Niamh. She just got back in time; she played 45 minutes and 55 minutes in the last two games for Liverpool but it was enough to say she was back on the field. And she was always going to be a starter if she was fit. There was a bit of nerves beforehand because there are so many young players coming on the scene.”
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After winning the junior All-Ireland in 2002, and reaching the All-Ireland senior semi-final in 2003, Galway knew they could go far in 2004. Fahy, now in his second year at the helm, appointed Annette Clarke of the Kilkerrin-Clonberne club as the captain for that year. She knew her team was capable of something big.
“We had taken confidence from the previous year,” she begins.
“We knew going into 2004 that we were there or thereabouts, that we had made the step up, and that we were very close to overcoming Mayo.”
That one year of practice was enough to condition Galway for greater heights in 2004. They won the Connacht championship after defeating Mayo on a bizarre scoreline of 0-16 to 0-2. They picked off Laois in the All-Ireland quarter-final before renewing their rivalries with Mayo again in the semi-final for the second year in a row.
With Galway trailing by three points, Fahey pounced for what the Connacht Tribune described as an “opportunist goal”, a pivotal moment in earning her side a replay which they would go on to win after extra-time.
By then, Fahey had turned 16 and had moved out from the inside forward line to more central positions on the field. Centre-forward mainly, but she could do a job at centre-back too.
Away from her GAA life, Fahey’s soccer career was blossoming too as she was also involved with the Republic of Ireland U19 squad.
Clarke remembers being struck by Fahey’s maturity during those first few sessions in 2003, as well as her young teammate’s busy dual-sport schedule.
“We would have admired her. She might be gone to a training camp for a week and would have put in intense training sessions with the Ireland squad but it was something she kept to herself. When she came into the Galway camp, she focused on that and wouldn’t even want you to ask questions.
“She probably wouldn’t even want me knowing that she was away. Just very modest but very professional in what she did, whether she was training with us or with Ireland. She would just work on that group for that particular time.
“PJ handled it quite well in both regards in dealing with Niamh from a personal point of view of not putting the pressure on her, and not making her make a choice.”
Galway were paired with Dublin in the 2004 All-Ireland final, a tough ask for the Connacht champions given that Dublin had contested the final in 2003. They were coming to finish the job.
Prior to the decider, Fahey was on international football duty as the Ireland U19s were competing in a three-game European Championships qualifying group.
For his part, Fahy admits that it was difficult to share Fahey with the Ireland team, but he never contemplated making her choose.
“From a selfish point of view, I wanted her full-time. But you couldn’t put that pressure on her because she didn’t deserve that pressure. I think for the semi-final, we only got her back that morning of the match. I remember talking to [then-Ireland U19 manager] Sue Ronan about it and she was nice about it. She came from whatever they were training they were doing and we worked it out.
“I knew from talking to Niamh that soccer was a huge part of her life. You knew that that was always going to happen. She was a very forward-thinking girl, she knew there was a big picture and she could see herself playing for Ireland.”
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Galway were in big trouble in the first half of their first-ever senior All-Ireland final. Dublin charged into a 0-7 to 0-1 lead as their challengers were left puffing for air. The occasion was consuming them. Fahy looked at the chess board and moved some things around.
One of the moves he opted to go with was switching Fahey from centre-forward to centre-back. By half time, they were back in the game — just two points behind following a goal from Niamh Duggan and a crucial late point by Annette Clarke.
Fahey’s relocation to the backs was the bishop taking out the queen.
“We made two or three other switches but that was the key one. We won the rest of the game 3-8 to 0-4. I used to call her The Special One when she was at Chelsea because of [Jose] Mourinho.
“The amazing thing about our team that day was that five of them, including Niamh, won a minor All-Ireland the following year [Fahey captained that minor side, which also included former Ireland rugby international Claire Molloy].
“The average age of the team was about 20. There’s a big difference in the age profile of county teams now but that was the age of the team then.
“A special girl from a special family. They’re unbelievable. Now she was full of life and devilment at the same time. I remember coming home from the All-Ireland and she was there at the back of the bus with Fat Frogs.”
It’s only when Clarke looks back at Fahey’s performance, that she can appreciate the magnitude of what she did at just 16.
“At 16 years of age, to be so physically strong and so tactically aware, and to be able to do that in an All-Ireland final after our centre-back got injured. With Niamh, she’s shown that over the years: the bigger the task for her, the more she thrives. You always see that with really good players when you set the challenge really high for them. They set their own levels high and get an even better performance out of them when you put that challenge up there for them.
“You forget how young she was and it’s only when you look back that you realise that she was literally only 16 and we put that task in her hands and trusted her with it. And rightly so. She was just the type of player who wanted to get the job done. She’d always do what was best for the team.”
A dual life between football and GAA couldn’t last forever, and Fahey eventually opted to stick with the former and head down the professional road. It was a choice that no one from the GAA community judged her for, and could only offer their praise and applause.
Fahey was on the pitch for Ireland’s pivotal win over Scotland that sealed their World Cup qualification, although she also had the misfortune of conceding a penalty after a handball.
“But if she hadn’t put her hand out,” PJ Fahy reasons, “it would have been a goal. And the penalty was saved so it was almost a miraculous handball. It made a big difference.”
Fahey has spoken before about how she would love to play Gaelic football again at some point when her soccer career concludes. GAA is in her veins. Her brother Gary captained Galway to the 2001 All-Ireland title and was also part of the side who lifted the Sam Maguire in 1998. Richie, another sibling of Niamh’s, was involved with both squads too.
But it’s the youngest of eight who is aiming to get to the top of the world Down Under right now. In an interview with The 42 last year, Gary rightly remarked that “We’re Niamh Fahey’s brothers now,” and not the other way around.
“I’ll be glued to it,” says an excited Fahy. “There’ll be no work done at 11 o’clock on Thursday morning.
Not bad for a child, all told.
