Hansberry is hoping for Bit o’ magic at the Showgrounds
SLIGO CAPTAIN BELIEVES SPECIAL ATMOSPHERE KEY AS SIDE EYE FINAL
EMMA HANSBERRY was one of the first people Steve Feeney called after becoming Sligo Rovers women’s manager. He knew that the former Ireland underage international had been working with the academy in her hometown and felt that her leadership and experience would be vital as Rovers tested the water in the national league.
Hansberry had won three titles, as well as an FAI Cup, with Wexford Youths. However, the physical and mental toll of those regular four-and-a-half-hour trips to and from Strandhill all become a little too much and the defender left the domestic game in 2018, going to college in England.
When she came home, Hansberry had offers back into football. All of them involved at least a few hours in the car three times a week though, which given her injury problems wasn’t ideal. Until Rovers’ long-rumoured plan of setting up a senior women’s team came to fruition.
‘From having to sit for four and a half hours in the car, I now had a team 30 seconds from my front door. It was a no-brainer for me to get involved,’ the 29-year-old Sligo captain says.
Hansberry’s goal against Bohemians
“Things have come together in last few weeks”
put Sligo Rovers, in just their second year as a senior side, into this evening’s FAI Women’s Cup semi-final against Athlone Town. ‘I didn’t know much about it, to be honest,’ she says with a laugh. ‘It just sort of hit me.’
But that goal means that Rovers are only one step away from a cup final in Tallaght Stadium. The club have done sterling work locally all week in promoting this game, hoping there will be a carnival atmosphere at the Showgrounds. The Bit O’Red have always been a club who have enjoyed the cup, and it feels like their women’s team are maintaining that tradition.
In the league, it has been a difficult second season for Feeney’s side. They sit second bottom, just above Cork City, but the sense is that they are coming into form at just the right time, having been unbeaten in their last three games.
And while Athlone will be heavy favourites this evening — Sligo have lost every game against them since coming into the league — there is a belief that they can spring a surprise.
‘Results haven’t gone as we would have wanted in the league, but we have put together some good performances in the cup and gone on a bit of a run,’ Feeney says. ‘I think our performances have been better than results suggested and things have come together over the past few weeks.’
The entry of Rovers into the league has given young footballers in the north-west a focal point — and a place to aspire to. Keeva Flynn, recently called into the Ireland under-17 squad, is just one of the local players whose talent can now be nurtured locally — Hansberry had to go to Castlebar Celtic as a 16-year-old.
And Rovers’ emergence has allowed players from other counties to follow their senior football dreams. Éimear Lafferty, Paula McGrory and the Loughrey sisters, Jodie and Keri, form a big Donegal contingent, while Casey Howe is from Fermanagh.
But it has also had a wider effect on women’s football in the area. As Feeney relates, the Sligo and Leitrim women’s league is back up and running after more than a decade in abeyance.
‘They have 11 teams entered for the coming season, which is incredible when you think it is only their first year back. And I think that is only going to grow because people see a lot of opportunity, especially now with a senior team in the area.’
Sligo Rovers are a club very much based in the community and are considered one of the progressive sides in the League of Ireland. The club chairman, Tommy Higgins, admits that it took a couple of years to get the senior women’s team up and running, but now they are as significant a part of the club as the men’s side.
‘Like everything, this needed to be costed, and when you have to travel down to Cork and Wexford a couple of times a season, a lot of trips to Dublin, it needed to be weighed up and funding found for it,’ Higgins explains. ‘But since they came on board, the women’s team have been treated the same as the men’s, get the exact same.
‘And what we have found since we founded the women’s team is that more families are coming to the Showgrounds, more young girls.
‘We had an upsurge in young girls doing our summer camps and it is the same now for our Halloween camps, much more young girls have registered. That is down to the national team getting to the World Cup, but also that we have a women’s team now,’ Higgins says.
Hansberry can feel the buzz around the women’s game, walking around Sligo. ‘It is down to the success of the national team over the past couple of years, qualifying for the World Cup and having 36,000 in the Aviva recently. Even around town here, you have parents stopping you, talking about our matches, saying their daughters have become big Rovers fans. It is growing all the time.
‘Hopefully they will all come out and support us against Athlone, create that special atmosphere that the Showgrounds is famous for, because it will make a difference and it could be the thing that gets us over the line.’
Feeney, who played for Rovers
“Hopefully they all come out and support us”
and Ballinamallard United in the Irish League during his career, has experienced plenty of those atmospheres in the Showgrounds and hopes for something similar this evening.
‘It’s huge to get the home draw and hopefully, we can capitalise on that by getting a decent crowd. It would be brilliant for the girls to experience the proper Showgrounds atmosphere, I was lucky as a player and a fan to experience them and there is nothing like it.’
The Showgrounds has hosted special cup nights many times, and the sense is that this evening can be another one of those — and firmly put Sligo Rovers women’s team on the map.