Get out and support camogie and ladies football sides

As always in Cork, there is massive hype around the senior hurling team, and there always will be.

Support is fast-growing for the footballers, especially after their magnificent display to beat Donegal.

But among that hype, we shouldn’t forget two sides that have been leading the way since our last senior men’s win in 2010.

Our camogie and ladies football sides have been outstanding as they regularly brought the O’Duffy Cup and Brendan Martin Cup back to Leeside.

The last few years have been tough ones for the ladies footballers as they go through a rebuilding phase, with a lot of senior players retiring from inter-county football and in some cases heading overseas.

This year the same can be said of the camogie side, who have also lost their fair share of key players.

For the ladies footballers last year was all about getting promotion back to Division One of the league, which they did under the guidance of manager Joe Carroll.

They then went on to win the Division One league title this year, but after that, their form dropped as they lost all their games in the Munster championship. They were then beaten by Armagh in the All-Ireland series.

For the camogie side, their league form was below the standards they expect of themselves, and they also lost out in the Munster championship. But we are in All-Ireland territory now, and last weekend was a key one for both sides.

The camogie team defeated Tipperary in their second round robin game, to see them in a strong position to head straight to the All-Ireland semi-final.

If they beat or draw with Waterford in their final game, they will avoid the quarter-final.

An unbelievable turnaround by this side, with wins over Galway and Tipp under their belts now, and rightly, they can now be confident taking on any side.

“We’re absolutely delighted to get over the line, and I suppose it’s pleasing in a way that it wasn’t a perfect performance, but we still ground out the win so we’ll take a lot from that,” said Cork camogie star Laura Hayes.

“We had a really, really tough league and a really tough Munster, and that’s certainly not something we’re used to.

“But I honestly think that we’ve been actually working so hard, we’ve been plugging away at training, doing a lot of fitness, a lot of hurling, and by the time we came back, we were really hungry.”

For the ladies footballers, last Saturday night was a do or die clash with Waterford, a team that hammered them in the Munster championship.

Again, the fighting spirit of this side came to the fore.

Cork looked set to bow out of the race for the Brendan Martin Cup when they trailed Waterford by five points with seven minutes remaining.

But with five seconds remaining, Katie Quirke hit the winning point for the Rebels as they won by 1-15 to 1-14 as they staged a remarkable comeback to stay in the hunt for the TG4 All-Ireland title.

A win for Armagh over Waterford tomorrow will see Cork and the former go through to the quarter-finals and the Deise bow out.

“We didn’t go mad at half-time because we were doing a lot of things right but we gave away the ball a lot, and we had nine wides,” said Carroll.

“No match is ever won until the last kick, and we kept fighting and fighting.”

Both these sides will keep fighting and fighting until the end, and deserve the support of the public every bit as much as the hurlers and men’s footballers. 

So let’s get out there and swell the crowd for their games over the next few weeks, starting with the camogie side on June 28 as they take on Waterford in their final group game at 3.30pm, most likely at Páirc Rí Rinn, but the venue has yet to be confirmed.