DUBLIN extended their winning streak in the All-Ireland Ladies’ Football Championship to four in-a-row last year but Armagh skipper Kelly Mallon insists the women’s competition remains much more open than the men’s.
Between them, the Dubs and Cork have shared the last 16 titles. Cork’s runs of five in-a-row and six in-a-row were split by Dublin’s win in 2010 and Dublin began their current winning streak in 2017.
However, they still have a long way to go to match Kerry’s nine in-a-row record set between 1982 and 1990. Will they get there? Not if Mallon and her Orchard county team-mates can help it and Armagh will begin the 2021 season fully aware that they had the measure of Dublin when they met them at the All-Ireland semi-final stage at Cavan’s Kingspan Breffni in November.
The black card shown to full-back Clodagh McCambridge was pivotal in that game. With Armagh’s defensive lynchpin in the sin bin, the Dubs scored 1-4 without replay and went on to beat the Rebel county in the decider.
“That was a massive turning-point in the game,” says Mallon, a sports development officer with ABC Council.
“We were happy with the position we were in at half-time and we just said: ‘Let’s really go at this and go after them and see what we can do’ but we lost Clodagh at an important time and that proved critical.
“But we did have chances after Clodagh came back on! I missed a couple of frees, Caroline (O’Hanlon) missed a couple, Aimee (Mackin) missed a couple so if we had converted those it could have been different.”
As you’d expect, the Armagh players and management were bitterly disappointed after that defeat but, with Mallon, Aimee Mackin and O’Hanlon contributing a dozen of their 17 points, they bounced back to win the Ulster Championship in December, beating Monaghan by two points in the final to end a six-year wait for the title.
“I’m very happy with our season,” said Mallon.
“The girls have more belief in the potential that’s in the panel now and you can’t buy that. It’s a real positive going into 2021 with the girls 100 per cent positive that we can compete at the top now.
“There are six or eight really competitive senior teams that are looking to dethrone Dublin and we are certainly in there. You’ve got Galway, Tipperary, Monaghan, Donegal, Cork… They’re all very competitive.”
The Dubs beat 2019 Ulster champions Donegal and Waterford in the All-Ireland group stage last year before going on to five-point wins over Armagh and Cork in the semi-final and final respectively. Unlike their male counterparts, there was no series of landslide wins and Kelly is convinced that the margin between the Dubs and the chasing pack is closing.
“The gap isn’t as big in ladies’ football as it is in men’s,” said Madden native Mallon.
“Obviously Dublin men are incredibly dominant at the minute but the gap isn’t as big in the ladies. Every game Dublin won, they didn’t win it by a massively-convincing tally, it was three-to-five points.”
The Armagh Ladies’ were scheduled to resume training on January 15 but with Covid-19 restrictions coming into force, the prospect of a return to collective sessions remains some way off.
“There’s a meeting towards the end of the month to review it but it doesn’t make sense to go back at the minute with how bad things are,” said Mallon, who’s also a successful road bowler, an interest she picked up from her dad Chris, in Armagh.
“I’d hope that we’ll be back in March if it’s safe to do so, if it’s not we have doctors, physios and occupational therapists on the panel and if it’s not safe then they aren’t going to feel safe coming into the training environment.
“So we are just doing our own thing at home and our strength and conditioning coach sends us things through to keep us ticking over.
“We don’t want to be torturing the girls either because some of them are under a bit more pressure than others with their work but we’re doing enough to hopefully keep us injury-free whenever we do return to the pitch.
“I’d love to be playing but there’s nothing stopping me going out and taking a few shots or doing a few runs and I have the garage kitted out as well so I can nip out do a strength session. I think everyone sees the bigger picture in all of this.”
