Hayes: 'I just can't speak highly enough of the players'

Old Leighlin are the Ladies Senior Football Champions for the first time since 2022 after a dramatic final, much to the delight of their manager, Barry Hayes, who embraced several of his players on the field after the game as a sea of blue washed over the SETU pitch.

“These bunch of girls, they approached me there in January to see if I could help them out. And look, they just gave me everything,” he said.

“You can see that right to the end, we just kept going. We just kept believing that this was going to be our time. We knew B/T weren't going to lay down easy - fair play from great champions - but I just can't speak highly enough of the players. Just unbelievable and they just pushed themselves right to the limit.

“There's very little between the two teams. We set the standards early on; BT have come to new standards, and we've had to try to reach that. I think it's great for Carlow football.

Old Leighlin didn’t make the most of their chances in the first half, and it looked like it was going to cost them when Clíodhna Ní Shé’s goal went in just before half-time. But Gemma Carpenter’s goal right at the start of the second half turned the game on it’s head yet again.

“It was probably a lucky goal,” Hayes said of Carpenter’s strike. “We had chances, we didn't take them, but I think we probably deserved that little bit of luck. And again, that just comes from hours and hours in the field, hours of training, practising those shots.

“We sat down at half time, we obviously lost that goal just before half-time, it was a sucker punch for us. But there was no madness inside, the dressing room was all just calm.

“And we just said we'd go back and try and imprint on what we've been trying to do, and look, thank God it just paid off.” This was the ninth consecutive SFC final contested between Old Leighlin and Bennekerry-Tinryland, and arguably the most dramatic. Hayes’s side showed tremendous tenacity at the end and won the game with a late goal captain Caoimhe O’Neill.

Hayes lavished praise on his captain, saying: “Caoimhe’s great; she's a brilliant camogie player, she's a brilliant footballer, brilliant basketballer. Like the rest of the girls, she just keep going to the end - they don't know when they're beaten.

Old Leighlan will now embark on a Leinster Championship campaign and perhaps plot a path to emulating Bennekerry-Tinryland’s accomplishments on the provincial and national stage. But the manager admits that next step has not come into his thinking in any way.

“To be honest, we just wanted to get over today,” he said. “I don't even know who we're going to be playing or anything like that. We were just completely focused on today.”