Karen Duggan: The women’s game can grow here, hugely, but funding is required

Needless to say – no bias – I view my own Peamount United winning the league as the season’s biggest story, but Sunday’s FAI Cup final between Shelbourne and Athlone Town can top off what has been a brilliant year for the women’s game in Ireland.

They’re two great teams with terrific support networks, this can be a really positive occasion for our game, and you can tell there has been a big push, especially on social media, to make this final a real spectacle for our league.

And it has been a really positive year, the bounce from our national team making it to the World Cup palpable.

Like Shelbourne, Peamount, as was well publicised, lost a bunch of their best players to Shamrock Rovers pre-season, so we both had some rebuilding to do. But clubs in our league have been accustomed to losing their best over the years, but usually to clubs in England and Scotland. It was different, of course, this time, we were losing them to a rival, but that’s when you draw on your gifted young players coming through.

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And our crop were outstanding for us this season, among them Ellen Dolan, Jess Fitzgerald, Mia McConnell and Freya Healy. Not only was their technical ability far greater than that of the more ‘senior’ players when we started out, but their focus and motivation was so high. It was incredible to see the difference between them and us when I first joined the league. College. Social life. All that. But these girls never skipped a training session.

A lot of that can, yes, be put down to the success of our national team, and the progress in the women’s game generally. These young players can see football as a career path, it’s a realistic aspiration now, they see opportunities opening up and their drive and dedication to take them is remarkable.

Their impact on our season was amazing. They brought a freshness to our team, their naivety refreshing. They weren’t remotely fazed by taking on the big players and the big clubs, there was a fearlessness about them, they carried no baggage from our failure to dig ourselves out of holes in previous years.

Rovers taking some of our best players wasn’t really a motivation for me, but it was for a lot of the girls, it really lit a fire in them. That and us being written off pre-season. We fed on that, it drove us on.

Considering those circumstances, I can’t tell you how proud I am to have captained this team to the league title, I’m not sure anything in my career has made me prouder.

So, when I look back on this season, I see lots of positives, while still having some concerns. As a standalone club, not supported by a major men’s club, like Shels and Rovers, there are obviously worries for Peamount in this drive towards professionalism.

As crude as it is, money is the centre of everything, so I don’t really know what the future holds for us. All I can say is that our board has worked extremely hard to not only keep us afloat, but to allow us be successful. I’ve no doubt that our conveyor belt of talent will continue, but unfortunately, at the end of the day, money comes into play. And that’s never going to be an easy task for a standalone club like ourselves.

But I’m optimistic. Even shooting the breeze about how we can improve our league is a good thing, not much of that was done before. Ultimately, all of this will fall on the FAI’s vision for the women’s game. That would always have made me nervous, having started out in a time when they were anything but serious about our game, but now that our international players are almost household names, I think if that focus was taken away, they’d hear about it.

The trajectory is there. The women’s game is growing massively, the opportunity for us to kick on is huge. I’m really looking forward to seeing who the next national manager will be – I have no clue! – and seeing what ideas they bring.

And the thing is, women’s football is such a wholesome product. The games are such family events, at Peamount we had hundreds of kids at our league trophy presentation, it was incredible to see. Women’s footballers are so accessible. It’s such a lovely community to be involved in. It’s special. Let’s build on that.

We’ll continue to lose our best players to clubs abroad who can offer them a professional living, that’s understandable. The be all and end all for these girls is to represent their country, and they’re being told in order to do that they need to be playing professionally. That’s why we see so few of our players from our league in the Irish squad. But it was always that way.

It would take a very strong personality to say, ‘I want to get my education first’, it would be brave of anyone to go against that. But I still think that more can be done here to take our game nearer to the standard that these players are getting abroad. That could change things, allied to scholarships that would encourage these players to stay at home a little longer.

The main thing is that you don’t want them going away until they’re ready, you don’t want to see them sitting on benches week in, week out in, say, England and Scotland, which is the fate of a lot of our international players this season.

Lots can be done to fix this, but, yes, alas, not much can be achieved without funding. The women’s game can grow here, hugely, but funding is required, especially for the developing of our young talent. Will it come? We’ll see.

Hopefully, Sunday’s FAI Cup final will help promote our game. I have a hunch that Athlone might just win their first silverware…but then there’s Shels’ experience. It’s funny, Peamount and Shels have always had a big rivalry, but that dynamic changed this season after we both lost so many players to Rovers. A common enemy.