When the tape recorder finishes rolling, Valerie Mulcahy apologises. “I don’t know if there was a lot in that for you,” she says with a grimace. She needn’t have worried. This is the last dance of a long year for Mulcahy. Top scorer in another final, a 10th All-Ireland stowed away. She didn’t come with her best game in her gearbag but what she brought was enough.
“I could make excuses and say it was bad but I don’t think the wind was a massive factor. It was a little bit breezy but nothing major. The misses were all me, just badly-struck. Enjoyed it in the end. A tough game, every score counted. It required a lot of patience. They were hard to break down because they had so many in defence.”
Kicking points in Croke Park is just one layer of Mulcahy’s being. Earlier this year, she put another in the public sphere when she was part of Donal Óg Cusack’s documentary on gay rights and later when she was at the forefront of the marriage equality campaign. Midway through the summer, she married her long-term partner. Somewhere along the way, she owes her a honeymoon.
Curious game
“This is an incredible finish to a great year for me. A rollercoaster year, a very emotional year. It’s great to have the icing on the cake. It’s been a very significant year, very proud to be Irish. Very proud to pass the referendum and then to be able to get married and have a lovely day and share it with friends and family. It was very special. The only restriction now is the school calendar – when I find a spot in that, we’ll go away.”
It was a curious game, as Eamonn Ryan conceded afterwards.
“It’s hard to sum it up. Dublin put an awful lot into it, they had a few bad wides from frees early on. We conceded a few more frees than we would have liked. Then we had some appalling wides. I thought it would never end, especially when they brought it back to a point. The team that is coming back from a bit of a deficit they usually have the wind in their sails and it looked like they might carry on but luckily we survived.”
We tried to push him on what the piling up of winning streaks means but he wasn’t having any of it.
Dopes
“I never think of that and I’m not being facetious. That would never enter my head. What you would be thinking is if we are beaten the next day we are going to get blamed and they are going to be saying we are dopes, that’s the way you’d be looking at it.
“You are always on trial. It’s not a question of going for records, I’d say if you started thinking that way you’d probably be beaten way quicker. Ten or five was never mentioned once in our dressing-room.”
As for Dublin, it’s another year of promising to be back next year.
Gregory McGonigle said: “If you look at the current profile of our squad 17 players out of 27 are 20-years of age or younger. That shows you that there is a lot more right in Dublin. Dublin, obviously, had been in the final in 2009, came back in 2010 and beat Tyrone, went missing then in ‘11, ‘12 and ‘13.
“We are now back competing at the level of winning All-Irelands.”
