Cork City’s Ciara McNamara: “I am the mammy of the team at this stage” 

IF a week is a long time in football, then Ciara McNamara has been with Cork City for a lifetime.

The 27-year-old is a veteran of the team that won the FAI Women’s Cup by defeating DLR Waves six years ago. 

A lot has happened since then, and now she is the oldest player in a dressing room managed by Danny Murphy.

If anything sums this up; it’s the simple fact that the goalkeeper behind her on the pitch is 15 years old.

That’s Cloadah Fitzgerald; a player breaking out of the academy while in secondary school, and McNamara is making sure people like her have someone showing the way as they try to figure out how to play against established sides in the Women’s Premier Division.

“It’s a role that I have had to grow into – especially over the last couple of years with younger players coming in,” she said.

“Which is great for the club; they are coming through the academy system which is fantastic. It is my role to talk to those players in these difficult moments and tell them to §stick to what they are doing. The tide will turn, hopefully.

“You can see it. Week on week. We’re making small improvements. There are still small things that we can cancel out in our game and they make all the difference.

“When you look at other squads; like Shamrock Rovers. They have Steph (Stephaine Zambra) and Aine (O’Gorman). They are older members of their squad. If I had to look at myself in that squad, I would be somewhere in the middle.

“It’s a role that I have grown into and I am the mammy of the team at this stage. I’m enjoying it.” Before all of this, McNamara was a teenager that first cut her teeth through Irish underage squads.

“I started about 2014 when I came back from the Euros in Norway,” she looked back.

“I kind of made a decision then that it was time to play national league. I was around 18 at the time when I joined so I’m here nine or ten seasons. We had a short season in between.

“I’m here quite a long time. I’ve seen a lot of players come and go. I’ve seen a lot of fantastic players play here.

“It’s nice to see the young ones coming up as well. There are definitely starts for the future here.” McNamara has seen a lot happen during her time with the club. She was there when City won its first trophy; the FAI Women’s Cup in 2017, and during the amalgamation with Cork City FC. She also worked alongside players like Claire Shine and Saoirse Noonan before they moved away and became established Republic of Ireland senior internationals.

Her practical point of reference for the growth of the club is the crowd that attended a recent FAI Women’s Cup match against Shamrock Rovers.

“It has grown year on year to be honest – even the exposure of the game has been phenomenal,” she said.

“Look at the crowd we had here today. Maybe five or six years ago, there would have been half or a quarter of that. People didn’t know that Cork City had a women’s team.

“The backing we’re getting from Dermot (Usher) is fantastic. We travelled to Belfast twice this year and we were put up. I know it sounds simple but in years gone by we wouldn’t have gotten that. It has just grown year on year and hopefully the results can start turning.

While there’s hope for the future; there is also a case for lament over how City went from challenging to sitting bottom at the table.

 McNamara experienced this first hand, she’s played in two FAI Women’s Cup finals with the club, and now she’s on a team that sits bottom of the league.

McNamara is the first person to say that it hasn’t been easy of late, but she knows the club is going in the right direction.

“It is a challenge for everyone,” she admitted.

“No one likes losing at the end of the day. We all want to win and it is something that we have to work on week in week out on the training pitch.

“Again – we are making improvements and they are small. As I said, hopefully results start coming our way.” The biggest positive that McNamara takes is the general growth of women’s football on Leeside.

“It is fantastic – you even look at all the different leagues and divisions there are now,” she said.

“There was probably one or two when we were playing. Now there is probably four or five. It is fantastic. Hopefully the game can keep growing and we can get some of those talented superstars up to Cork City soon.”