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Joe Reidy, manager of The Banner, at left, celebrates with players following their Senior Ladies Munster football final win over St Valentines at Kilmallock. Photograph by John Kelly.

‘Townie’ full-back delivers for Munster champions


BANNER Ladies’ full-back Laurie Ryan is one of the few ‘Townies’ in the Ennis club’s set-up. From Summerhill, Ryan had to mark St Val’s full-forward Caoimhe Creedon, one of the Cork champions’ most able footballers.

“It’s a great feeling. It’s surreal at the moment and especially for Katie Cahill to score the winning point,” she marvelled, clearly stunned that Cahill had split the post in such dramatic circumstances.

“We knew coming down that we had a great chance. We’ve been training hard all year. I’d say this is the biggest effort we’ve put in in a long time. After last year, we knew we were close enough and the young girls had another year’s experience. It was great to go out and show today that we could do it,” she added.

As she spoke, one couldn’t but notice that Ryan had a significant swelling underneath her right eye.

“In the first half I clashed with one of their girls. It started swelling straight away,” she explained, laughing it off.

Underage dominance has led Banner to establishing itself as Munster’s top senior club in 2013.

“Since I remember, we’ve always been competing at the top level underage and it’s starting to come through now. When we first came on to the team is when we first started winning senior championships. The youth coming in after us again is brilliant. As you saw, Aoife Keane and Gráinne Nolan were brilliant. Hopefully we can keep it coming,” she enthused.

The Ennis girl is the only member of her family to specialise in kicking the size four for a pastime. “I’d be the oldest but the rest of them wouldn’t have much interest in sport. I started playing at the Holy Family and I ended up sticking with it then,” Ryan outlined.

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