An inspiration? Niamh McGrath isn’t having any of it.
Sure, she’s closing in on another AIB All-Ireland club camogie title with Sarsfields just 10 months after giving birth to baby Ruadhán.
She was actually back swinging timber just eight weeks later, featuring in a league game against Athenry before summer had even arrived.
But she isn’t the first or the last camogie player to make a hasty return to the pitch after childbirth.
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That’s her claim by the way, not ours, because it seems like a monumental feat in itself just being in a position to toe the whitewash at Croke Park this weekend after such a draining few months.
“To be honest, I’m not an inspiration to anyone,” says McGrath, captain of Sarsfields when they won their breakthrough All-Ireland club title in 2020. “It was just kind of for myself and trying to prove it to myself as opposed to anybody else really that I could do it.
“A lot of women have done it before me, I remember last year Lucinda Gahan was playing in the All-Ireland final for Dicksboro and she only had a baby five or so months beforehand and she basically won that All-Ireland for Dicksboro.
“Niamh Kilkenny is flying it and she only had a baby last year, Annmarie Starr, there’s countless women that have had babies and come back so I knew it could be done just from watching them.
“They were kind of my inspiration to get back, to be honest. You kind of don’t know what’s ahead of you but it’s going good so far.”
McGrath’s plan is to keep it all going for a few more years yet. Childbirth hasn’t brought any sort of barrier to her sporting ambitions.
“I’m going to go playing for as long as I can anyway,” she says. “I am still only 31, so I think I have a few years left. I would be thinking more about things from a time perspective. You can’t really go anywhere on the weekends with training being so intense at the minute.
“That’s the only kind of negative but we’ll have a nice break now after the final, hopefully we’ll get to do plenty of things then.”
These are boom times for McGrath and her Sarsfields team-mates who are an hour from a fourth national title in six seasons. In all, they have contested seven of the last eight All-Ireland finals. Stats like those are hard to walk away from.
They’re a tight-knit band of sisters too, as one-point wins in five of their semi-final wins attests.
Last time out, against Loughgiel Shamrocks, they probably should have been done for when they conceded 3-3 early in the game. Their old rivals from Antrim had two goals scored in the first five minutes alone. Slowly but surely Sarsfields clawed themselves back into that one, took the lead for the first time in the 60th minute and won by the minimum for a finish up.
I know a lot of people were saying that we’re kind of coming towards the end but in my mind we’re not
According to McGrath, it’s up there with the very best of their wins over the years.
“But if we don’t go on and win the All-Ireland now, it means nothing really,” she says.
Baby Ruadhán has been at most of the games and might even get a spin in the cup if McGrath is successful on Sunday. She is just happy that she will have an opportunity to influence the game having looked on helpless last year as Dicksboro prevailed.
“It was horrible watching them in the last 15 minutes when Dicksboro got on top, and then to lose,” McGrath says. “It was definitely tough but we’re back again this year and I can actually control things, well my own performance anyway, and be a part of the team that’s playing so it’s great to be back.”
Whatever the outcome, McGrath feels like there is more to come from not just this generational group of Sarsfields players but from the club.
“There’s a cohort of us that have been involved in 10 county finals since 2012, when we got into our first one against Killimor,” she says. “There’s five or six of us that have been involved in the 10, winning eight of them.
“It’s not just about this era though, to be honest, there’s more coming through because we won the minor A in Galway this year and the junior A and the junior D as well so we still have a lot more to come I think.
“I know a lot of people were saying that we’re kind of coming towards the end but in my mind we’re not, we’re kind of just leaving it for more girls to take over from us.”
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