O’Neill’s long road to recovery worth the toil

Regardless of club affiliation or personal connections, nothing quite resonates with sporting people and supporters like an athlete refusing to be beaten by setbacks, and ultimately getting rewarded for their determination, their faith and their resolve.

Whether it’s Noel McGrath coming back from cancer to resume his Tipperary hurling career, Louise Ní Muircheartaigh finally reaching the top of the mountain with Kerry, or even a more global story like Tiger Woods in the 2019 Masters, those moments tug at the heartstrings of people who revel in the human stories behind our sports.

Orla O’Neill’s 2024 journey wasn’t quite on that scale, but the physiotherapist and Clann na nGael centre-back still had an arduous road to travel in order to get back onto the field, and the emphatic manner in which she seized the day in Ballyleague was one of the highlights of the afternoon for everyone watching last Saturday, even the shellshocked St. Brigid’s supporters.

“It's very frustrating, but you see the girls working hard. They’re my motivation to get back on the pitch. There’s always that voice in your head saying that you’re not going to get back to where you were, but you just have to ignore that and keep working hard, keep grinding,” O’Neill confessed, as she basked in the glow of her team’s remarkable success in last Saturday’s county senior ladies' football final against St. Brigid's.

“For myself, a lot of it was work off the pitch, I couldn’t be on the pitch. It was the same for Jenny (Higgins) and Megan (Kelly) as well. It’s monotonous, but you have to keep going.

“Then that loss last year (against Boyle), that really gave us the motivation, certainly for myself. Then I was part of a county panel this year and I didn’t get to play one minute of championship football because of injury, that’s really hard to keep going. But watching the girls struggle on and being so resilient, that makes you want to get back out there,” she continued.

Yet for 30 minutes, it looked like her efforts were going to be in vain. It wasn’t that the seven-point half-time deficit was irretrievable, but more pertinent was that Clann looked to be off the pace, as they have been for long stretches of this year’s championship campaign.

“That game was a story of our whole year,” O’Neill suggested.

“At the start of the year, everything was so hard for us. We really struggled, we had players missing and we struggled to get going. Then for the second half of the season, we really started to pick it up, and that game was the story of our season.

“It started off slow but we held our nerve. We always knew we were a second-half team so we regrouped at half time and then we said we’d leave it all on the pitch, and that’s what we did. We started off strong and went from there.”

O’Neill admitted that Clann veered away from the gameplan in the opening half before retrieving the situation by sticking to their own game.

“We reverted to what we know we can do best, which is to push up and attack, take the game on instead of sitting back and letting them come at us. It worked, and they didn’t know how to respond.

“I think a lot of people wrote us off at the start of the year, there were predictions made that we’d be beaten in a semi-final (against St. Dominic’s), and that sort of stuff fuels our fire.

“We’ve been biding our time, working hard all year trying to get players back on the pitch and trying to get our gameplan in place. We had a new management so these things take time.

“We drew our first championship game (against Dominics) and we started building from there. We got players back, we got games into us and fitness into us, and the young players got more and more experience.

“Ava Gavin is only 16 years old but she got more and more experience, playing for the whole league and the whole championship and today she held her own in a county senior final. That shows all around the pitch.

“At the start of the semi-final it started to click and then, today, that second half really showed what we’re capable of,” she concluded.