By Daragh Ó Conchúir
These end-of-year bashes are fun but they’re just not the same without a silver guest of honour.
In the case of Aoife Donohue and the Galwegians at last Friday night’s PwC Camogie All-Stars, having been within hailing distance of the O’Duffy Cup when last they were in Croke Park but seeing it lured away by Cork was tough to take.
A former PwC senior player of the year, Donohue was nominated again for the individual honour, chosen by her peers. She missed out on that too, to Cork’s Laura Hayes, but that didn’t bother her in the slightest.
The diminutive Mullagh ace was one of five Galway players to receive All-Stars and she was picking up her fifth gong.
But losing the All-Ireland to the last three points, having reeled in a six-point deficit to draw level down the stretch, remains an open sore.
“We were very close,” says Donohue. “It was there, wasn’t it? It was there. It’s a pity. We got a lot right. We had a plan, obviously, and it worked fairly well. The last ten minutes were crazy, from what I remember.
“I remember the goal obviously going in, and like, you're down the far end of the pitch and all you see is the back of the net going. You don’t see anything else. Then they go five or six up, then we get ourselves back into a really good position again, and then the last ten minutes was just crazy.
“There were a couple of chances. And then I remember, definitely, Ann Marie Starr being creeled. They’re frees you have to be giving but we had chances, had a couple of wides that should have been put over the bar, one after the other.
“I think this is gonna hurt for a long time. It’s probably the one that will stick with me. We were there in ‘21 we won, we were there 2019, we won. We lost the Covid final all right and apart from that it was 2015 and I was quite young, I wasn’t long starting.
“Kilkenny deserved to win the Covid final, they played better on the day but we got caught. They’d their homework done, took a lot of us out of the game and then (Denise) Gaule got the penalty and that was game gone.
“But this year will stay with me a long while.”
It would have been a sweet one after a “very up and down” campaign but they backed the quality they had if they could just get to a final.
They were given little chance in that game, having been destroyed by the Rebels in the group stages. Ailish O’Reilly revealed afterwards that Donohue, who missed that game with a hamstring injury, delivered a stern message afterwards.
“Some small words of encouragement,” is how she describes it now.
“As long as I've been playing with Galway, we never would have lost a game to that degree. We had Waterford the following week in the quarter-final so it was kind of do-or-die. There was a few of us that spoke. Obviously, I was sitting watching from the sidelines, and emotions were probably a little bit high.
”We probably needed it. We had a different team out that day but we still wouldn’t have wanted to go down losing that game and to that degree either. It was a bit of a wake-up call and we kind of gave up. They were running around us. It was embarrassing.
“We were lucky we had two training sessions to get right for that weekend, or our year was over.”
They got over that and then scored the last three points to deny Tipperary by the minimum in a pulsating semi-final, before producing their best performance of their year in the decider. There is little consolation in that, though.
“We got a performance out of ourselves. Ultimately, we're obviously hurting. It’s never easy, losing an All-Ireland, and we obviously believed that we could win it. We came very close.”
The relief was the split-season. In the old days, an All-Ireland final would clash with a first week back at school. That’s not ideal as a teacher, in the build-up to the game or the days after it, win or lose.
That isn’t an issue in August and what’s more, there is still time to hop on a plane.
“We were in Ibiza, just like me and my sister, my mom, my aunty and all Ciara’s friends. They all turned 30, so really, it was their holiday, and we just tagged along.
“You need it. We used to just never get away. You wouldn't be able. You’d be back in school, it’d be impossible.”
She remains one of the headline performers in camogie. Funny now to think, when there was talk of changing the game’s rules to allow more physical exchanges, that it was the likes of Donohue people feared would be brushed out of the game.
Instead, with less stoppages, she has been elevated, her athleticism and skills having more opportunity to be exhibited.
“In the past, I suppose you might have been held up, on a run or a tackle, and the whistle is blown, whereas now, you play on. The physical side of it's gone huge. I’m definitely not the biggest player but it’s definitely improved the game, and made it a better spectacle of it for everyone.
“As players, we just want to see the game being let go… it's definitely come on loads from when I started.”
