Malachy Clerkin: Generations of girls will be in the Ireland team’s debt

When Ireland finished their warm-up on Tuesday night, Courtney Brosnan was one of the last to leave the pitch. Louise Quinn was still out there, whiplashing headers back at Harriet Scott like a soprano going through the scales one last time. But otherwise, it was only the goalkeepers left to troop back into the dressing-room. First on, last off. Nothing left to chance.

As Brosnan jogged to the sideline at Hampden Park, she looked up to the area just above the tunnel and broke into a wide smile. Standing there waiting for her, dead centre so she wouldn’t have to waste time trying to find him, was her father Shawn. She waved up, he blew a kiss down. She disappeared down the tunnel, he retreated to the top of the stand. Right up at the back, where he had only the wall behind him and wouldn’t be blocking anybody’s view.

“I’m more of a stander than a sitter,” he chuckles. “When you’re the parent of a player — and especially the parent of a goalkeeper — it’s pretty stressful. I like it when I can stand in that last row and watch. I have been fortunate in that I have seen Courtney perform in the most difficult situations and work through it. I have a tremendous amount of confidence in her. I don’t try to put myself in her shoes.”

Dotted around that part of Hampden’s South Stand, it wasn’t hard to pick out all the other families. Stuck to the back wall near where Shawn Brosnan watched the game, a handmade poster read: “I’m Jamie Finn’s sister.” The next row down, a line of Irish fans in jerseys stood side by side, each one of them with Caldwell 7 on the back.

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The McCabes were down a bit closer to the pitch — Katie’s father Gary, her mother Sharon, her kid sister Lauryn, already an Ireland under-16 player. “Yeah, I think they paid about a grand on flights — Ryanair doing them!” the Ireland captain laughed afterwards, as the celebrations began and the fuzz and fog of disbelief at what they’d just achieved began to lift. “But they got here.”

Here, at Hampden Park, on the southside of Glasgow. Here, on the night they made the World Cup. Here, at the end of a campaign that changes forever what is expected of women’s football in Ireland and what can reasonably be hoped for by those who come after them.

Of course the families were here. The families are always here.

[ Amber Barrett: I want people to say ‘we want to win this game, so we need her on our team’ ]

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Every player has a story and every story has a beginning. It’s John O’Sullivan bringing Denise to play with the boys at Nufarm Athletic. It’s Áine O’Gorman playing with Stella Maris boys in the morning and her father Jimmy bringing her to watch Olivia O’Toole and the Ireland women in the evening. Every woman in the Ireland squad started in a place where a World Cup was unthinkable. Not just for the players but for their families too.

O’Gorman made her international debut in 2006, a couple of months short of her 17th birthday. Back then, you’d have needed a fairly bleak sense of humour to wish an Ireland soccer career on a 16-year-old girl. They lost the first seven games she played in by an aggregate score of 18-0. She had to wait until her 12th cap, 17 months after her first one, to feature on a winning team.

She recalled her first start this week, in the same Richmond Park where she had gone to watch O’Toole and the others only a few years previously. Germany tonked them 3-0 in front of a couple of hundred fans. “If even that,” she smiled talking to us on Wednesday morning.

It was the last game of the group and Ireland had only scored in two of the other seven matches. Germany had already topped the table and would go on to win the World Cup the following year. Trying to stay afloat in water that deep at such a young age was thoroughly unfeasible.

But Jimmy and Mairead O’Gorman never tried to put her off it. They ignored the obvious fact that picking a life in football was completely lacking logic and instead left her at it. On the night in 2019 when she was honoured by the PFAI and given a special achievement award by Robbie Keane, the first people she dragged in front of the photographers were her parents.

O’Gorman has been an Ireland player for 16 years and 113 caps. She has one retirement already under her belt, another staved off until next July at least. Her partner Rachael Neary had their first child this summer — James will turn one during the World Cup. There were so many stages along the way where this destination wasn’t just unlikely but flat out impossible. Look what happened.

“I grew up playing with boys,” O’Gorman says. “I went to play with Stella Maris. That was the closest team to me in Dublin. But now you look at clubs — there are as many girls teams as there are boys teams, there’s Emerging Talent, high-performance centres.

“I had none of that. I had to go and play with the Emerging Talent for Boys. It was something I loved, something I was passionate about. I was so driven and dedicated to it that nothing strayed me from it. It was something I enjoyed, and all the hard work is paying off.”

[ Áine O’Gorman: ‘I always said, the dream is to play in a major finals . . . I am so lucky to live that dream’ ]

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Shawn Brosnan speaks and sounds and looks like exactly what he is. A middle-aged, middle-class American dad, a CFO of a technology company, the kind of guy you could happily pass an hour with on a commuter train into Penn Station. He and his wife Sharon have three daughters, who they raised in Short Hills, New Jersey.

All three are grown up now and have gone about their lives, so the Brosnans sold up a few years back and moved to a smaller place in Madison. On a good day, they’re 20 minutes from Newark Airport. This is not an insignificant detail. If you’re going to follow your daughter’s assault on the World Cup, if you’re going to be standing by the tunnel to blow her a kiss when she’s done with her warm-up, proximity to an international airport is eminently helpful.

Throughout Ireland’s qualifying campaign, Shawn Brosnan was in Tallaght for every home match. He was in Glasgow on Tuesday evening. After the night of nights, he went down to London for a few days to work before heading to Liverpool for Everton’s top-of-the-table clash with Chelsea in the WSL today. Then it’s back to the US until next time. What else would you do?

As Ireland emptied in the 1950s, his father left Annascaul in Kerry and his mother left Roscommon. Their lives intersected in Springfield, Massachusetts where they met, married and in time had three sons, who in time delighted them with a grandson and seven granddaughters. At 8.11pm last Tuesday, one of those granddaughters dived low to her left to save Caroline Weir’s penalty and inch Ireland that bit closer to the World Cup.

If you want to pan for the reasons Ireland are going to Australia next summer, Courtney Brosnan is one of the biggest, brightest nuggets. She came into the campaign surrounded by so many questions — even now, Brighton’s Megan Walsh is seen in plenty of quarters as the better goalkeeper. But with five clean sheets in a row to see it out, there’s a decent argument to be made that Brosnan is Ireland’s player of the campaign.

It’s just over a decade since one of her coaches at the Players’ Development Academy in New Jersey showed her father an email he’d received from the then Ireland under-17 manager Harry Kenny. The FAI were looking for players fitting certain eligibility requirements, which the Brosnan family history clearly did. All that was left was to put her on a plane.

Over 90 per cent of Vera Pauw’s squad have college degrees — and they will need them. Football won’t keep any of them in clover when they’re done. None of them would qualify for a mortgage this morning, nor any morning in the foreseeable future. Yet neither they nor their families would change a thing

She was 16 years old. The people who would be waiting on her at the other end were strangers Shawn had only ever spoken to on the phone. It was a monumental leap of faith for everyone involved. Nobody was dangling a World Cup in front of them or anything like it. Simply getting her across the Atlantic and back without anything going wrong was the extent of their ambitions. They jumped. Look what happened.

“As a parent, you are always concerned,” he says. “It’s not just getting on the bus at the corner of the street, you know? I think to some extent it helped that my wife Sharon had done a lot of travelling when she was younger. Her family moved quite a bit — she had lived in London and in Japan. And I had travelled a fair amount for business.

“So that instinct was there for wanting our kids to explore as much as they could. We never looked with any of our children to limit what they were capable of and we wanted them to find their own life path. You try to guide them, of course. To be there on Tuesday after all the ups and downs Courtney has been through in her career, it was just surreal to see it all manifest itself.”

[ Vera Pauw’s trust in Courtney Brosnan repaid as Ireland goalkeeper at top of her game ]

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When it was over, when the six minutes of stoppage time were finally called and the pitch lit up with pinballing orange shirts, the families all went down to the front of the stand. The Hampden security men initially got a bit crotchety about it but the FAI staff did a good job of making sure they got down to the hoardings where the players could see them and touch them and make sure it was real.

Over they came, one by one, hug by hug. Embraces filled with laughs and tears and roads travelled. Only they can know how much went into this, how distant a prospect a night like this would have been for so long. Only in those hugs can the true nature of the gamble each of them have taken with their lives make sense.

Between now and next summer, lots of ink will be spilled and airtime filled about legacies and inspirations and the knock-on effects of qualifying for a World Cup. Big themes everywhere you look, well-meaning chat full of earnest aspiration. But when you break everything down, a very simple thing has happened. The outer boundary of what is possible for young girls playing soccer here has been staked miles beyond where it was before.

It was madness for Áine O’Gorman to play for Ireland at 16. Or for Louise Quinn to head off to play in the Swedish second division at 21. Or for Chloe Mustaki to give up her recruitment job earlier this year to sign for Bristol City, halving her salary along the way, just so she can play football full-time and keep her place in the Ireland squad. It was madness for their families to bite their tongues and trust that they knew what they were doing.

Over 90 per cent of Vera Pauw’s squad have college degrees — and they will need them. Football won’t keep any of them in clover when they’re done. None of them would qualify for a mortgage this morning, nor any morning in the foreseeable future. Yet neither they nor their families would change a thing.

Because the upshot of all that combined madness is that Ireland are going to the World Cup. That’s a real thing, a tangible, attainable goal for young Irish girls today in a way it never was before last Tuesday. Whatever Ireland do next summer, they’ve done that at least.

Generations of footballers to come will be in their debt.