Dublin beat Kerry for their sixth All-Ireland senior women’s football title

All-Ireland women’s senior football final: Dublin 0-18 Kerry 1-10

We’ll probably never find out what exactly went on behind closed doors last October but it certainly wasn’t a happy Dublin camp.

The suspicion all year when Mick Bohan trumpeted to anyone that would listen about simply wanting to be competitive this year, that anything beyond that would be a big bonus, was that he was being more than a little coy.

This, after all, was coming from a man who had guided Dublin to the four-in-a-row only three years ago and who still possessed many heavily decorated players. Along with the more recently acquired Hannah Tyrrell who we will come to shortly.

Yet as the build-up to the 50th All-Ireland senior final continued, it became clear that the Dublin dressing-room really was a pretty scary place to be around last Halloween time.

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“There were some long conversations that weren’t pretty ... in terms of what came out from players and management,” said Sinead Aherne. Another player even spoke of how “unhappy about a lot of things” they all were back then, the memory of an All-Ireland quarter-final loss to Donegal still strong.

From there to here, it has been some turnaround. Dublin are back on top of the women’s game and on the basis of the first-half performance they turned in to break the back of Kerry’s challenge, condemning the Kingdom to back-to-back final defeats, they could be here for some time.

The fear among Dublin supporters after a strong quarter-final performance against Donegal, and an even stronger one against Mayo, was that they might not be able to sustain such excellence.

But they produced the best 30 minutes of their season in that first half before using the cushion of a seven-point half-time lead, 0-11 to 0-4, to carry them through a more evenly contested second period.

Tyrrell was electric in that opening half, scoring four points from play and four from frees. She had a big hand in winning three of those frees and set up Orlagh Nolan for a score too. The very best efforts of, firstly, Ciara Murphy, and then Kayleigh Cronin weren’t near enough to thwart her.

But back to October.

“I wouldn’t say Hannah saw last October that she was going to win an All-Ireland,” quipped Bohan. “The quality was poor [back then]. The bottom line is that there was so much to learn. I look at Niamh Donlon who played her first competitive game for us only five weeks ago in a challenge game against Mayo. Five weeks ago! And she’s after playing now in an All-Ireland final and from what I could see gave a fairly decent account of herself.

“Niamh Crowley, her first season out of minor, you’d put her in your pocket, she’s five foot three, but she has the heart of a lion and that’s the point. The experienced players were like big sisters to them, they taught them so much in that amount of time. This is genuinely a really good story in sport because we were not in this arena, we were nowhere close to it and I have been there, I can tell you. So this one is sweet.”

Bohan took the opportunity to settle a score with the Kerry management also over the war of words which erupted after the sides played their group game in Parnell Park. He claimed after that game that his team had been bullied, a charge Kerry refuted and later turned back on him, alleging that Bohan had been playing mind games.

“We were bullied in Parnell Park,” insisted Bohan. “No playing the media, no arra, yerra, begorrah stuff – that was a fact. We were beaten to ball, pushed off ball, we got a lesson. We knew that day we had to stand up to that. We had to become more physical in the contest.”

It was Kerry joint-manager Declan Quill’s assessment that Dublin went too far in the opposite direction this time.

“I don’t know how many cynical fouls Dublin had,” said Quill. “An awful lot. They’ve had a lot in their last two games. There were no cards shown. I don’t know ... look, I’m not going to go down that road. That wasn’t the winning and losing of the game. Dublin won it fair and square. I’m not going to blame a ref. That’s not the Kerry way.”

[ Hannah Tyrrell adds another chapter to one of Irish sport’s most remarkable stories ]

Quill reckoned Louise Ni Mhuircheartaigh got particularly rough treatment, principally from experienced Dublin defender Leah Caffrey. That was a terrific duel which broke somewhere around even, Ni Mhuircheartaigh shooting 1-7 but just 1-1 from play.

Ni Mhuircheartaigh’s 55th minute goal gave Dublin a real fright, helping Kerry to whittle down a nine-point deficit to just four at one stage. Lauren Magee will have nightmares about allowing Amy Harrington sneak beyond her on the right endline before playing the ball across for the fisted goal.

Dublin could absorb that mini-crisis though and, fittingly, closed out the scoring with a terrific late point. Carla Rowe was the beneficiary of a clever decoy run by Tyrrell which opened up the space for the team captain to burst into.

Caffrey, Rowe, Tyrrell and Jennifer Dunne – the latter will head to the AFLW and Brisbane Lions on Wednesday – were Dublin’s standout performers. For Kerry, who introduced captain Siofra O’Shea in the second-half despite upcoming ACL surgery, Emma Costello summed up their no surrender spirit.

“It’s very hard to put your finger on it,” said Quill, searching for an explanation for the first-half display. “The group were so calm, they were so ready. I thought they were ready to explode into the game and go on and win it for the first time in 30 years.”

DUBLIN: A Shiels; L Caffrey, A Kane, N Crowley; L Magee, M Byrne, N Donlon; J Dunne (0-2), E O’Dowd; C O’Connor (0-1), O Nolan (0-1), K Sullivan (0-1); H Tyrrell (0-8, four frees), C Rowe (0-4, one free), J Egan. Subs: E Gribben for Egan (h-t), N Hetherton (0-1) for Kane (42), S Aherne for Sullivan (53), D Lawless for Gribben (59).

KERRY: C Butler; É Lynch, K Cronin, C Murphy; A O’Connell (0-1), E Costello, C Lynch; L Scanlon, L Galvin; N Carmody (0-2), N Ní Chonchúir, A Galvin; H O’Donoghue, D O’Leary, L Ní Mhuircheartaigh (1-7, six frees). Subs: M O’Connell for Galvin (h-t), S O’Shea for O’Donoghue (42), A Harrington for Ní Chonchúir (47).

Referee: S Curley (Galway).