You can’t but be awed by the resilience of sports folk who battle back time and again from serious injuries, how they somehow find the strength of character to put themselves through gruelling, lengthy, lonely periods of rehabilitation, when us mere mortals would throw our caps at anything remotely soul-destroying. A headache, even.
So, when the nominees for the TG4 Players’ Player of the Year awards were announced this week, you couldn’t but doff the very same cap to Donegal Gaelic football captain Niamh McLaughlin when her name appeared on the senior shortlist along with the brilliant pairing of Meath’s Emma Duggan and Kerry’s Louise Ní Mhuircheartaigh.
A physiotherapist, the 29-year-old lists “ACL rehabilitation” as one of her “specific interests” on her LinkedIn page, and having had to go through that very process three times in the earlier days of her sporting careers (yes, plural), she’s an authority on the challenge.
It was at the 2017 World University Games in Taipei that she suffered the third of them.
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She had come on as a substitute for the Republic of Ireland soccer team in their game against Britain, among her team-mates that day a fellow Donegal woman you might have heard of: Amber Barrett. And a string of her other team-mates – including Chloe Mustaki, Claire O’Riordan, Eve Badana and Eleanor Ryan-Doyle – went on to be part of the squad that qualified for next summer’s World Cup.
And just to show what a tiny sporting world it can be, on the British side for that game were goalkeeper Megan Walsh and forward Lucy Quinn, while midfielder Lily Agg was also in their squad – all three, thanks to their roots, now in the Republic of Ireland set-up.
McLaughlin was only on for seven minutes when she tore the anterior cruciate ligament in her left knee, having already ruptured and re-torn the one in her right.
By then she was playing in the English Super League with Sunderland, where Beth Mead, the 2022 Ballon d’Or runner-up, started her senior English club journey. At the same time, McLaughlin was studying physiotherapy at Northumbria University, where she went on to do an MSc in strength and sonditioning. She was flying.
She’d put in the hard graft – and miles – to earn the opportunity too. She’d started out with Greencastle FC, but as a teenager the nearest women’s National League club to Donegal was Castlebar Celtic, so she’d do the six-hour round trip by bus for training and games. That dedication earned her a spot on the national underage teams, alongside the likes of Katie McCabe and Denise O’Sullivan, but those two early ACL injuries derailed her progress.
A combination of her 2017 injury and Sunderland pulling the plug on their women’s team because of their financial struggles saw her return to Ireland. She initially worked in Dublin’s Santry Sport Clinic before returning to Donegal to take up a position with the Health Service Executive in Letterkenny.
She resumed her football career with Shelbourne, but eventually put her focus back on playing Gaelic football for Donegal, for whom she had made her senior debut in 2010. In her first game back for her county, after a four-year absence, she scored 2-2 in the 2019 Ulster final win over Armagh. As comebacks go, it was decent.
She was made captain of Donegal by manager Maxi Curran last year, retaining the role in 2022, her outstanding form for her county earning her a Players’ Player of the Year nomination.
She’d be forgiven for cursing Meath, though. Donegal lost to them by a point in April’s National League final, and then by two when they met in July’s All-Ireland semi-finals, thereby crushing McLaughlin’s dream of becoming the first woman to captain Donegal in a senior All-Ireland final.
But if she can come back from three ACL injuries, she can come back from that disappointment. Plenty of time yet to achieve the dream.
For now, all you can do is salute her resilience. Strength of character? Immense.
