Emma Duggan and Meath relishing the chance to dethrone Dublin

It was back in February that Emma Duggan talked about the challenges of being a Leaving Certificate student in 2021, about how she struggled with those spells of home-schooling when she was isolated from her friends. Being stuck in the same room all day, every day, doing her remote learning on her iPad, trying to get to grips with the strangeness of it all. "When you're in school there is at least a change of scenery," she said, "but it all looks the same now".

After a year as testing as that, she and her pals have more than earned the right to let their hair down after their Leaving results come out this Friday. Duggan, though, will have to delay her revelling until next week. On Sunday, after all, she’s playing in an All-Ireland final.

You won’t forget this year in a hurry?

“I definitely won’t,” laughs the 19-year-old, one of the most gifted forwards in the country. “It’s been very eventful, a memorable one. But as a nation, we’ve all come through it. I know it’s not completely over yet, but we’re getting there. And I couldn’t have asked for a better end to the football year than Meath reaching a senior All-Ireland final for the first time. Well, winning it would be better still.”

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When she reflects on the year, the hardest part of it all was when she couldn’t train with her Dunboyne or Meath team-mates, lockdown pressing pause on the sport that has been an integral part of the rhythm of her life since the days her father Liam, who played for Laois, would take her out on to a pitch and teach her how to kick with her left and her right.

She has represented her county at every grade since the age of 12, making her senior debut when she was 16. Football has always been a release, “a good mental break” from everything else that was going on, not least studying for her Leaving.

On a roll

It was all the more frustrating because she and her county had been on a roll. After losing the 2018 and 2019 All-Ireland Intermediate finals, they buried that heap of hurt when they made the breakthrough in December of last year, Duggan top-scoring in the final with seven points in their victory over Westmeath five days before Christmas.

That put them back in the senior ranks for the 2021 Championship, the county having opted to drop down to Intermediate level in 2017 after a morale-sapping streak of hammerings.

The goal for 2021 was simply to retain that senior status, but Duggan and her comrades had an inkling that they could achieve more than that. That inkling morphed in to belief once they got up and running again, beating Kerry in June’s Division Two League final to earn a place in the top flight for the first time in seven years.

And while they lost to Cork in their opening Championship game of the year back in July, their first at senior level since 2016, it was only by two points. “We took a lot of confidence from that,” says Duggan, “especially because we felt like we’d under-performed that day, that there was a lot more in us. But to go so close against one of the best ladies teams in history gave us real belief.”

A four-point victory over Tipperary got them out of their group and in to the quarter-finals where Duggan’s 1-5 helped them to a shock seven point win over Armagh, last year’s semi-finalists. Well, it was a shock for most, but not for Duggan.

"Yeah, there would always be outsiders saying our results this year have been shocks, but we knew we were good enough to get to this point, we got a lot of confidence from our run of form. And that's been building since the lads took over in 2017 [manager Eamonn Murray and his team of Paul Garrigan, Shane Wall and Paddy Dowling]. Meath were at the very bottom of the ladder then, but they implemented something really, really special, and we're just reaping the rewards of it now."

Professionalism

"The level of professionalism that they brought is unbelievable. And one of our best assets is our fitness coach Eugene Eivers who came in in 2020. When the players have all these facilities, strength and conditioning coaches, nutritionists, psychologists, you feel like a proper athlete. All you want to do is get better and use those facilities to benefit yourself.

“So, I don’t think our results have been shocks, we’ve been steadily working on reaching this point, getting stronger all the time. Beating Armagh was the big turning point for us, reaching the top four in the country in the senior ranks. That gave us real confidence, and having gone so close against Cork earlier in the year, we didn’t have much fear going in against them in the semi-finals.”

That confidence seemed misplaced when they trailed Cork by seven points with less than five minutes to go in Croke Park. It was then, though, that they produced a jaw-dropping comeback, scoring 2-1 in those final moments to take the game in to extra-time, during which Duggan’s three points helped push them over the line.

“People were asking us what were we thinking with five minutes to go, but there wasn’t too much thinking going on. We just wanted no regrets, we never gave up, we pushed on, stuck to the game plan, which we trust. To turn over an experienced team like Cork in the last few minutes was massive for us, it was a very special day. It’s been a long journey, we had a lot of heartbreak along the way, but we learnt from it.”

Now for the ultimate test, the county’s first ever senior All-Ireland final against the five-in-a-row chasing Dublin.

“It’s hard enough to win one never mind to be going for five in a row, it takes a really, really special team to achieve that,” she says. “It can be daunting if you think about it like that, but we feel we’re very deserving of a place in the final. We’ve gone in to all our games this year as underdogs and that only adds to your hunger and motivation. And there’s less pressure on you, you can throw the shackles off.”

“It’s 15 v 15, anything can happen. We trust ourselves, we back ourselves, so we’re quietly confident. Playing Dublin in the final puts fire in the belly. We’ll relish every minute of it.”