Every mistake – every fumbled ball or missed shot – was confirmation that I didn’t belong there. “For me, it warped into a weird, pressurized sort of test. A perfect diagnosis of how joy and confidence leaks away. There’s a great passage on training when you’re not in the team. It was exhausting, and I hadn’t even pucked a ball.” “I wanted to be overjoyed at the win for the sake of the team, but I felt unable to bury my personal disappointment. It’s dispiriting, it’s self-centred, it’s covetous – and yet it’s also entirely natural. In an environment focused on positivity and the collective good, no one wants to hear it. The loneliness of the unused panel member is heightened by the fact that it’s so hard to express. “Permanent status as a substitute brings out the same symptoms as unrequited love: jealousy, paranoia and yearning. On the bench, you tend to question everything. Should we be valuing lives in the currency of medals when hers was somewhere in the attic, disregarded? She has an All-Ireland medal with Tipperary but as an unused sub. It probably helps she was not a superstar, just a very good hurler. Or maybe by anyone capable of expressing these complicated feelings. Maybe it’s good to hear them thrashed out from a woman’s perspective. It’s great on some of the sportsperson’s universal conditions. Or even the gradual narrowing of those differences. Still, the power of Eimear Ryan’s memoir of a camogie player is not really in the many differences that still exist between men’s and women’s sport. I think of the kids today who will now be pressing me into their own sticker books. “I think back to that young girl in Hinderwell, and the hours she spent slipping cards of her favourite Premier League players into her collector’s album. The Arsenal forward thrilled at the novelty. There is a striking passage in Beth Mead’s book, Lioness: My Journey to Glory, where her mother June, who died in January, comes home ahead of last year’s Euros with an armful of Panini sticker packets, to begin the search for one of her daughter. Naturally, these thoughts on difference are a feature of nearly all sports autobiographies written by women. We only saw camogie players on TV once a year, and they were rarely in the papers – never a picture to cut out or a poster for the wall.”
“Even as a kid I realized that for a female player there would be no glamour. “In the scrapbook, there isn’t a single woman.” Bobby Ryan, Paul Delaney, Fox, the Bonnars, the Ryans. A double spread of Nicky English photos, naturally, to open it. Researching the book, she found a scrapbook she had put together aged four.
Really, she had internalised that knowledge a long time before.
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