Camogie All-Ireland final: Cork’s Ashling Thompson fighting her way back into the team after disappointment and injury

In the last play of last year’s All-Ireland camogie final, Ashling Thompson was fed by Fiona Keating for a scoring opportunity to potentially level the game for Cork.

Thompson’s long-range effort from a tricky position sailed wide at the Davin End though and referee Ray Kelly blew for full-time moments later. Kilkenny were champions, just, and Thompson, crestfallen, simply kept walking and walking, all the way back to the Cork dressing room.

It wasn’t until a while later that she returned to join her team-mates, looking on forlornly as Kilkenny celebrated.

A year on, Cork are back in the final and having gained revenge on Kilkenny at the quarter-final stage, and then beaten Galway, they are strong favourites against Waterford, novices at this level.

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The question for the Cork management is whether or not to use Thompson, their lionheart and ultra experienced midfielder, from the off. She suffered an ACL injury just weeks after last year’s final and has only featured twice this term, as a sub against Kilkenny and Galway.

No doubt, she would love the opportunity to put right last year’s wrong.

“If you were to ask me who I would want to have the ball in that situation,” said Cork captain Amy O’Connor, recalling last year’s stoppage time episode, “it would be Ashling. She was very, very unlucky with the shot. I think she took it hard. But she’s long enough in the game now to know that these things happen.”

So will Cork manager Matthew Twomey include the Milford colossus from the start?

“Who knows! It is a tough one,” shrugged O’Connor. “In fairness, Ashling Thompson has been like a professional athlete since the injury happened to her. Credit where credit is due, she was absolutely phenomenal, so regimental in her recovery and I’m so delighted for her because she’s flying in training. She looks great, she looks sharp. She really, really went about it in the right way.”

Last month, Thompson’s partner, Limerick hurling star Darragh O’Donovan, celebrated another All-Ireland success at Croke Park. The expectation is that there’ll be more celebrations on Sunday for the couple, though O’Connor baulked at the suggestion that the Cork-Galway semi-final, which Cork won following three previous losses to Galway this year, could possibly be considered the real final.

“You can’t look at it that way,” she insisted. “You’d be a fool to look at it that way. Waterford are a very, very good team. The three top teams, who have traditionally met in the final, were on the same side of the draw. But you can’t look past Waterford. It’s going to be a very, very difficult game for us.

“Being in Munster, we have come across them a huge amount. This is the first year we haven’t played them too often funnily enough. We only played them once.”

As it happens, Cork lost that encounter. It was a Munster quarter-final tie, at Pairc ui Chaoimh in late April, and Waterford won by three points, the first time in more than a dozen outings that they’d beaten Cork.

Waterford went on to lose the subsequent provincial semi-final heavily to Tipperary, but bounced back with a perfect record in their All-Ireland group and they gained revenge with a Nowlan Park win over Tipp to secure this Sunday’s showdown.

O’Connor has admiration for the road Waterford have travelled, reaching their first final since 1945. Yet she and her colleagues deserve plenty of credit for a battling campaign themselves, pulling off some huge wins despite being stripped of dual players for several games due to a series of camogie/football fixture clashes.

“We had three dual clashes this year,” said four-time All-Ireland winner O’Connor. “It meant unfortunately that we were without four players for one game and two for two other games. It’s not ideal for preparations.”

Some on Leeside wondered if the dual clashes and the failure to re-arrange those fixtures amounted to a punishment of sorts, for the strong stance Cork took regarding the All-Star trip protest earlier this year.

“Ah no, I’d take no notice of that,” said O’Connor. “It was what it was. There were (potential) solutions along the road regarding fixtures, to push out one game or change the timing of another, but it just didn’t work out.”