LAURA O’Mahony returns to the scene of one of her favourite football memories this Saturday. In November 2023, O’Donovan Rossa defeated Kerry kingpins Clounmacon/Moyvane in Mallow to win the Munster club junior football crown – and O’Mahony is back at the north Cork venue again this weekend and again facing Kerry opposition.
‘The same result on Saturday would be nice!’ O’Mahony quipped, before laying out the size of the challenge ahead of Cork in the TG4 Munster Senior Championship final against Kerry (4pm, live on Spórt TG4 YouTube).
‘We are not delusional, Kerry are a fantastic team,’ O’Mahony explained, ‘They’ve been in the last two All-Ireland finals and they were in the league final this year so we will be up against it.
‘We will need our best performance to get over the line but these are the games players want to play in.’
While Cork are the defending Munster champions, Kerry are the form team, and the favourites, as Rebels boss Shane Ronayne has admitted: ‘Kerry are that small bit ahead of us at the moment, but if we can play at our best we will have a right rattle off them.’ O’Mahony feels the same: Cork need to focus on their performance and hope that leads to the result they want.
The Skibb woman (23) has a 100 percent record in Munster senior finals since she joined the senior set-up in 2019 – O’Mahony has won provincial medals in 2019, 2022 and ’23 (a 5-14 to 2-17 triumph in Mallow), but success this Saturday would be the sweetest yet given Cork’s season to date. The new-look Rebels were relegated from Division 1 of the league after slumping to six losses in a row, but have rebounded in Munster to win two of their three round-robin ties, beating Waterford (1-10 to 0-11) and Tipperary (0-11 to 0-10), while losing away to Kerry (1-14 to 1-10).
Cork footballer Laura O'Mahony in action for O'Donovan Rossa.
O’Mahony feels they have turned a corner following the turmoil of the league.
‘During the league, because the games came so fast, we didn’t really get time to properly get to know each other,’ the Cork star explained, referring to the turnover of players.
‘It is hard at the start for new players on the panel, trying to get to know the person as well as the footballer. When the league finished we got a bit of down-time, and could go to training a bit earlier and talk to people we might not usually sit beside in the dressing room. We had a few team bonding sessions as well that have helped, including a day out at Kilworth Woods.’
The Rossas leader pinpoints the opening Munster series win away to Waterford as a key moment in the campaign. O’Mahony scored the crucial goal in that 1-10 to 0-11 victory in Dungarvan in April that came two months after the Déise inflicted a damaging 2-12 to 1-6 defeat on Cork in the league at Páirc Uí Rinn.
‘The league didn’t go to plan, that’s not a secret, we got relegated and confidence wasn’t as high, but when we got that win against Waterford there was a sigh of relief because it showed this team can win together,’ O’Mahony said.
‘We have the talent and the potential, and we showed we are capable of getting results. Getting those wins against Waterford and Tipperary are a big help confidence-wise.
‘We were written off going into the Waterford game, but we believed in ourselves and had the confidence to do it, and we got the result.’
The challenge is ever greater now, as Kerry travel across the county bounds on Saturday desperate to get their hands on some silverware, and O’Mahony knows more than most the boost that winning trophies can have – she was a driving force on the O’Donovan Rossa junior football team that won it all in 2023, with county, Munster and All-Ireland successes.
‘The wins with Skibb only makes you hungry for more. I want that feeling again, and I want to keep pushing myself further,’ she stated.
‘I loved every minute of what we achieved with Skibb and now I want to push harder and hit those heights with Cork.’
O’Mahony took a short break from football at the start of the year as Skibb’s season ran up to the Sunday before Christmas. She needed that time away from the pitch to recharge the batteries before rejoining a group that has seen a lot of change in recent seasons. The retirements of Ciara and Doireann O’Sullivan and Roisin Phelan, for example, are huge losses for the team to soak up, while Meabh O’Sullivan, Eimear Meaney and Laura Fitzgerald are also missing from the starting line-up.
‘You obviously miss anyone who leaves, and think back to this time last year and the squad we had, but the younger girls have stepped up, and you have the likes of Emma Cleary and Sarah Leahy who have a big voice this year; they are both vice-captains. We still have a good mix, with the likes of Maire O’Callaghan, Shauna Kelly and Melissa Duggan who have been here for years and then there are the new girls,’ added O’Mahony, who feels she is also benefiting from joining the working world. Having finished college last year she is now a maths and PE teacher at Kinsale Community School, and this structure is helping her football.
‘To be honest, anything is better than this time last year,’ she said. ‘I found the last year of college very difficult. We had placement, college in the evenings and then county training so it was a lot to balance and find time for. Now once the school day is over you can focus on training, and how I can prepare and recover.’
O’Mahony will hope to head into the classroom with another Munster medal on Monday morning, if it all goes according to plan in a venue that holds fond memories for the Skibb woman.
Time for some more magical Mallow memories.
