All Ireland Champions

[ryot]

Naomh Ciaran Ladies Football won the All Ireland Division 1 Féile title yesterday.

This is a fantastic achievement for an Offaly Club ( Offaly county teams have long been graded Div 3 & 4 So a Div 1 title was hardly imaginable).

Has an Offaly team ever previously won a Div 1 title at Féile?

I see they wear the Green & Blue (of Ferbane & Doon?).

Congratulations to all involved, a mighty win.

[summerindublin]

Yes congrats, well done I see that they also won Division 2 Feile last year, i wonder how many girls from last year were underage for this years Division 1 win. They must be a serious because the ST Laurences from Kildare that were beaten in the semi-final are a very good side, i've seen them playing in the Kildare Feile final and also wininig the Kildare u/14 champioship. So well done again.

[Ahlethimoutwithit]

Well done to ST Ciarans, fantastic result. A lot of good work taking place with underage ladies football at the moment.

[naasmanxrhode]

Well done St. Ciarans, must get a game against ye later in the year, my girls are all u/13 and we are preparing for next years Feile.

[Lone Shark]

Outstanding stuff from the girls and mentors this weekend - I wasn't able to stay around in Ferbane for the celebrations on Sunday night, but I imagine it all went well. Some great footballers in that group, and while it made life a lot easier amalgamating with Doon/Shannonbridge, winning at a level like this will be a huge boost for the girls and hopefully will be the start of good things to come for ladies ball in the county.

A word here too to the lads - playing in division 1 is not easy and it turned out that their 3-8 to 2-3 performance against St Brigids was better than any other club fared against the eventual winners. Several clubs on the lads side can be proud of their efforts, so you'd have to say there seem to be some good footballers coming up along the line.

Funnily enough though, it's nearly better to win a girls event, and hopefully this will help drive a lot of clubs in the county to make a better effort with their girls' teams. The key to any successful club is getting everyone involved and it's no surprise that Rhode, the flagship club when it comes to mens' football for the last decade, is also the leading club at ladies gaelic as well. Offaly ladies teams in the last few years have invariably been largely made up of players from Rhode and Edenderry only, and that's a big factor in why they're playing in division 4. We're capable of so much better, and the knock on effects at all levels would be huge.

I remember going down to Wexford Park for a minor hurling match between Offaly and Wexford a few years ago, 2008 or 2009 off the top of my head, and I ended up seated just in front of George O'Connor, who at the time was at the heart of Wexford's revival at underage and academy level. Wexford won the game easily, and I got chatting to him during it about what he was doing, and how he went about it. It was amazing how simple it was - he said it was driven by two things - getting existing players, club and county, out to coach young lads. Kids respond so much better to lads they see doing it than fellas who may have done it years ago, but struggle to connect now. Secondly, he pushed every club to field a girls team as well. (Incidentally, look at Wexford camogie now??)

His logic behind this was simple. He said that it was a great thing in itself, but that wasn't always enough to convince committee people, who measured success by the adult male teams in the club. So he used this logic - he asked the club how many players off club under-16 teams did they keep? He asked what happened to the others, and invariably was met with "lost interest". He then put it very simply - when you were a 16 or 17 year old male kid, what were you interested in? Hurling or football possibly, but meeting girls of the same age was always high on the agenda. So if the girls in the parish were hanging around in the pub or at the chipper, where would you be? But if the girls in the town were hanging around down at the GAA field, where would you be? When the pressure comes on later in life to go training, which woman is more likely to push you out the door to go playing, and which woman will pull you back in to sit down beside her and watch Grey's Anatomy? The one with an interest herself.

It's a flawed logic in the sense that ladies games are worthy of a lot more resources and energy in and of themselves, but sometimes you've to use the wrong logic to get the right result - and Offaly clubs could probably do with a dose of the same.

[Fargo Boyle]

Damn those sexy women. George O Connor was right, women are the root of all evil. Sure if it wasnt for my one at home I'd be a dual inter county star with a set of balls hanging off me