This is the end. For real this time. A week short of her 35th birthday, Hannah Tyrrell heads for Croke Park this weekend like a kid who keeps finding a way to put off bedtime but now, finally, is ready to relent. As long as Dublin and Meath don’t finish level and go to a replay, this will be her final game of intercounty football.
She thought – she knew – that her final game was last year, when Galway beat them in extra-time in the All-Ireland quarter-final. In Parnell Park that afternoon, her family and friends gathered around her afterwards and everybody accepted that was that. Her second coming with Dublin had been a beautiful coda to a rugby career whose success had surprised her as much as anyone. Now it was time to go and live and be.
“I knew – well, I thought I knew – going into last year that it would be my last year,” Tyrrell says. “And so when we lost to Galway in the quarter-final, it was obviously devastating and not where we wanted to end up. But, yeah, I was done. I definitely was ready to walk away and move on and do other things in my life.”
So she did. She and her wife Sorcha have two-year-old Aoife at home and, as any parents of a toddler will attest, that pretty much dictates what “doing other things in your life” means. Aoife was born just a few weeks before Dublin’s All-Ireland victory in 2023 and is just getting to the stage now where she understands what it means when she sees Tyrrell grabbing her gear and heading for the door. As far as everyone was concerned, there was going to be a lot less of that.
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But a trip to Australia around Christmas changed things. She went over to see family but while she was there, she met up with Sinead Goldrick, one of the dwindling number of AFLW players who has managed to keep up an intercounty career to go along with her Aussie Rules one. Goldrick was coming back for one last year and popped the question to Tyrrell. Why not do the same?
Well Sinead, the why-nots were plentiful. Hannah Tyrrell had been playing top-level sport in one code or another since 2008. She was 18 years old when she played in her first FAI Cup final, losing to St Francis in the 2009 decider before winning it in 2011.
She flitted between Shamrock Rovers and the Dublin Gaelic football team for a few years before taking up rugby on a whim and being fast-tracked to a full-time Ireland contract in 2014. For most of the past decade and a half, her time was never entirely her own.
“I have a young family at home and I wanted to be able to spend time with them and not be restricted by all the training and everything else,” Tyrrell says. “Even just summer holidays – as a teacher, you’re confined to certain days you can go away and stuff, and obviously that’s in the middle of the football season.
[ Meath v Dublin All-Ireland final: Throw-in time, team news, where to watchOpens in new window ]
“That stuff can be incredibly frustrating, if you’re not involved in football, for the people around me. But no, coming back, obviously there were lots of conversations with team-mates, with the two lads Derek and Paul and obviously with my wife Sorcha about how we would make it work.
“There are obviously sacrifices people have to make in order to make training and a couple of accommodations here and there with management. But I suppose I felt things didn’t go to plan last year and I wasn’t entirely comfortable with how I played last year. It was hard to walk away on an ending like that. So we made things work to go again.”
Even then, it probably should have ended before now. Dublin were having a reasonably drama-free championship right up until the point at which they weren’t. A fortnight ago in Tullamore, as the clock ticked down to 43 seconds left with Galway a point ahead, it looked for all the world like the curtain was definitely falling on Tyrrell’s career this time around.
[ Dublin putting 2021 hurt behind them to set the record straight against MeathOpens in new window ]
But a free conceded by Galway for over-carrying got moved up to the 40m arc because of time-wasting. Had the Galway players just dropped the ball and let Dublin get on with it, it would just have been a matter of seeing out the 43 seconds with 15 players behind the ball. But it got moved up and Tyrell was able to kill the rest of the clock and send the equaliser over the black spot to bring the game to extra-time.
“It was tense, it was frantic and all the rest. But you want to be in a very calm head space when you’re playing football and particularly when you’re on the ball as a forward. So for us, we were kind of just thinking about the next play, trying to keep tipping over a couple of scores.
“Because I think, for both teams in the second-half there was a period of 15-20 minutes where nobody scored. Just because of the nature of it and the intensity, the tackling from defenders, etc. So for us, we were just trying to stay as calm and level headed as possible and keep our work rate up. We knew that if we played the way we know we can, the scores were there for us. We needed every last second to to get them.”
So here she is. One last game. One last big stage. For all her achievements, Tyrrell never actually played in Croke Park until 2021. It was only a month after lining out for her last rugby game in the Six Nations and she slotted in with Dublin as they took on Cork in the league final. She has always loved it there and revelled in the space – her Player of the Match display against Kerry in 2023 was an adornment to the old place.
Back in real life, Tyrrell teaches history in St Patrick’s Cathedral Grammar School in the city. She leans on that sense of history every time she sets foot in the stadium, all the players that went before, all the drama that unfolded. She isn’t the kind of high-profile player who brushes off what these things mean to the women coming behind her. Embraces it, in fact.
“That’s why I’m such a passionate advocate for giving women’s sport a chance and for trying to give it coverage and everything else. People wonder why it’s not seen as being at the same level as men’s sport and all the rest. And I’m like, ‘We’re still in our infancy.’
“Women’s Gaelic Football has only existed since the mid-1970s. Even if you take rugby, men’s professional rugby only came in in the mid-1990s – and no fault to the players themselves but when it came in, it wasn’t exactly pretty rugby to watch. But give it time and rugby’s such a huge sport in Ireland right now.
“Give it time, give it a bit of backing, give it some funding and support and you can see how well it flourishes. And I think we’re starting to see that we’ve a long way to go in women’s Gaelic football. But we’re definitely moving in the right direction and we’ve made leaps and bounds.
“We talk about legacies and everything else. That’s what our team’s about. It’s about families, our culture, who we are as people, how privileged and lucky we are to represent our city and this amazing, amazing county. And we want to leave a legacy that younger girls, my daughter included, can look up to and hopefully emulate when they’re in our position.”
Tyrrell being Tyrrell, she’s not going to be leaving team sport entirely behind her. There’s club football with Na Fianna still on the horizon and she is looking forward to getting into playing flag American football, the non-contact version of the NFL she so loves. All the stuff that’s in her, all the drive and go that made her such a multi-sport phenomenon, she can’t just turn it off at the mains.
“I’m fairly competitive,” she says. “When I started playing rugby, I never planned to go on and play for Ireland. I just really enjoyed the sport and then I just wanted to be better each time. And that kind of drove things for me. Gaelic football is the same. When I started, I was a goalkeeper but wanted to play outfield and kind of was told, not outright, but like … you’re not good enough, basically.
“And so that there for me was that competitive edge to show that I was. Same with the soccer, being the only girl against boys, I was seen as the weak link. And again, I just wanted to prove people wrong. I’m very competitive. I don’t let anybody win, really. That’s just been my whole life.
“With the flag football, I joined the South Dublin Panthers last October and played a little bit with them. So I’ll go back and play that socially for a bit, it’s really good crack. But I’m not the type of person that will be sitting on the couch. It’s just not who I am. I have to stay active. I’ll look forward to being just somebody, which is nice. Not being in elite sports.”
That’s Monday’s business though. The astonishing, unique sporting career of Hannah Tyrrell has one more Sunday in it yet.
