‘It’s been a long time coming’

Satisfaction for manager Moynihan after near misses

SOME 22 years after capturing the county's first All-Ireland senior ladies football title, Galway added their second with a 2-7 to 0-12 final victory over Kerry at Croke Park last Sunday week.

It was tight, tense and not without incident. But the bottom line is everything in elite sport and Daniel Moynihan's side shook off the pain and regret from several latter stage defeats to have their day.

“Satisfaction is probably the best word to describe it,” Moynihan told Herald Sport on Galway's success. “It's been a long time coming for Galway as a whole. I suppose just for us as a group as well, a three-year process, it's nice to finally get over the line after near misses along the way.”

Those defeats hit them hard. To Dublin in a dour, low-scoring final in 2019. To a chastening loss to Kerry in the '24 decider. Most recently in '25, when suffering a devastating semi-final exit to Dublin after extra-time. What made the difference in '26?

“I think that mental strength was built over a period,” replied Moynihan. “Even though we hadn't planned on reaching a league final, but along that journey towards a league final, we beat all the teams that are in that kind of Division 1 top-six, top-eight.

“That brought on a little bit of belief that even though it was league football, we were more than capable of beating anybody in the country. When you do that and the players see that, it becomes that bit easier to inject that confidence into them, and they saw that themselves. I think the league campaign was pivotal for us to get to where we needed to be, even though we had a couple of blips along the way as well.”

There was no shortage of negative analysis on the state of the ladies game in the aftermath of their win over Kerry. Galway had taken down Meath, Tyrone, Mayo and Armagh with heavy-duty scoring returns of 2-21, 4-20, 2-20 and 0-21. 2-7 sufficed in Croke Park and Moynihan believes some of that commentary was unfair.

“I think slightly. There's people out there, with click-bait media that is out there as well, who will just will look at one game as a whole and draw a comment on the whole state of ladies football in Ireland, based off that one game. You could easily do that on the men's side of it and make a lot of comments about where men's football is over the years in the finals that we've had there as well.

“I don't know what you call it, lazy journalism or lazy media talk or whatever else it is, but you'd like to think the people that are invested, not only the supporters, but the media that are invested in ladies' football, and there's plenty of them out there as well, that they're well aware that Kerry are a fantastic football team, that Galway are a fantastic football team, and the two best teams reached the final.

“From there on in, if you look at where both teams are over the last few years, it probably was going to be kind of a cagey affair, and that's how it turned out. It wasn't as if myself and Mark [Bourke, Kerry manager] were turning to our teams and saying, 'Right guys, let's go out and be defensive here'. We had a game plan, but the game plan wasn't going to revolve around us blocking things up. We both tried to play our football.”

Victory brought fulfilment for Moynihan and his players, and the hours and days since then have been special.

“Post-game, it's a bit all over the place between interviews, and I suppose the players reached out to family members along the stands and stuff like that. I know I missed quite a bit of that with the interviews going on, unfortunately, which obviously is a little bit disappointing from my own personal perspective. I think as a whole, it was a great buzz straight after, and I think only when we went into the dressing room and it was just us, it was nice.

“We went into that astroturf area and had a nice chat just amongst ourselves because we knew once we stepped out of Croke Park, obviously going into a banquet with family and everything, you're not going to get everybody together again. So we had 10, 15 minutes there together, which was nice.

“Then when the banquet came, it was great to see so many happy faces, with quite a lot of people still going, 'Jeez, I can't believe it'. There's been so many players that have been there for 10, 12 years trying to get over the line, so there is that little bit of disbelief.

“It's always a good year when you climb the mountain and you're number one after the season ends.”