Eoin Harrington reporting from Cork
Tuesday night will be an emotional occasion for Megan Connolly, Denise O'Sullivan, and the Corkonian contingent of the Ireland squad, as the women's national team returns Leeside for the first time in 12 years.
Not since Ireland were beaten by Scotland in a EURO 2013 qualifier back in 2012 at Turners Cross have the Girls in Green visited the rebel county. 827 people attended that day. In and around 15,000 are expected in SuperValu Páirc Uí Chaoímh for the visit of France on Tuesday.
A previous visit of France, back in September 2011, drew a crowd of just over 2,000 people to Turners Cross. Among them were Megan Connolly and her dad, Michael.
Léigh an scéal seo trí Ghaeilge ar Liathróidí.ie brúigh anseo.
22 September 2011; Aine O'Gorman, Republic of Ireland, in action against Sonia Bompastor, France. UEFA Women's EURO 2013, Group 4 Qualifier, Republic of Ireland v France, Turner's Cross, Cork. Picture credit: Diarmuid Greene / SPORTSFILE
With another WNT game in Cork just hours away, Michael says that the importance of these occasions for young players cannot be underestimated.
I was lucky enough to get the chance to catch up with Michael Connolly in the family home near Turners Cross ahead of Tuesday night's game.
Connolly has lived in Turners Cross his whole life. One gets the sense the family has always been sports-mad, with football games between Megan and brother Luke infamously competitive affairs in the household.
The family also has a close relationship with Nemo Rangers GAA club, with Megan having played for the club for several years, and her brother Luke only recently stepping back from duties with the club's senior football side.
17 July 2023; Pictured are Denise O'Sullivan wearing the jersey of Wilton United and Megan Connolly wearing the jersey of College Corinthians AFC. Photo by Stephen McCarthy/Sportsfile
Perhaps no surprise, then, that Megan was so determined to pursue sport as her future path - and she was soccer-mad as a child.
However, the local club College Corinthians did not have a girls' setup at the time, so Connolly was forced to play with the boys' teams from the age of five or six - a path followed by many of her now-Irish teammates.
Her father Michael soon set about fixing that. He was responsible for restarting the club's girls' football operations. Connolly says that he found the club hugely supportive and that it was a matter of putting back together pieces that had fallen apart over the previous years.
It was a huge club and very progressive.
When we started, at that stage there was no girls' side. We tried to get an interest going, we put out flyers and got a lot of girls involved. Then we tried to whittle it down to 20 or 25 girls who we could put into a league, which was the Cork schoolgirls' league at the time.
Now, we were getting hammered out the gate...we had to start kind of raw training and just get going.
[We did] everything. My wife was washing all the jerseys and then we had the cones and we had the bibs and we had the whole lot going out to the shed.
There was about four or five of us who pushed it on. We managed both teams.
Connolly's involvement fell across all areas of girls' football operations and his efforts afforded his daughter the chance to play football with her peers for a club.
He even served as his daughter's coach on the girls' team but he assures us Megan received no special treatment, echoing comments made by her in a recent FAI-produced video feature.
I'll be honest, she never got any special treatment. I never made her captain, I never gave her a trophy! I got absolutely murdered at home for not doing that!
But I feel now looking back at it that I should have given her a trophy and made her more selfish. She's kind of the ultimate team player.
She'll do anything for the team, she'll run those horrible yards in that defensive midfield position.
Those are the horrible runs you get no recognition for but whatever role she gets she'll take it on and she'll take it on 100%. That's from getting the sh*t end of the stick when she was younger!
Whatever the coaching plan was, it's safe to say it's worked out brilliantly for Megan Connolly.
6 July 2023; Megan Connolly of Republic of Ireland with her family after the women's international friendly match between Republic of Ireland and France at Tallaght Stadium in Dublin. Photo by Stephen McCarthy/Sportsfile
Michael tells us that he could not have dreamt when reinvigorating the College Corinthians girls' programme and having his daughter involved that the endgame would see him travelling to Australia to watch Megan play in a World Cup.
Not in a million years.
I never thought in a million years that we'd go to a World Cup but, when it all came down and we got there, it was brilliant to be involved in the first World Cup trip.
It was brilliant, Jesus the atmosphere was incredible. Australia is some place.
The first match in Sydney was incredible, the atmosphere, the din.
The people of Cork will be hoping for a similar din when Amhrán na bhFiann rings out along the banks of the Lee on Tuesday evening.
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Megan Connolly's childhood club buzzing for historic Ireland WNT visit
15 July 2024; Megan Connolly during a Republic of Ireland women's training session at SuperValu Páirc Uí Chaoimh in Cork. Photo by Stephen McCarthy/Sportsfile
Having come up through the ranks at College Corinthians, Megan Connolly was forced to eventually choose between her dual passions of soccer and Gaelic football.
There was only one option for her there. Megan Connolly made the move to the United States in 2015, having obtained a four-year scholarship at Florida University. During those four years, she lined out for the Florida Seminoles, and she returned to a contract offer from WSL side Brighton and Hove Albion.
Her father says that the support from the backroom staff ever since Connolly's breakthrough to the Irish senior team in 2016 has been immense, and says that the cultural shift since the watershed player protest of 2017 has been similarly immense.
Connolly Sr also says that many of the skills and physicality Megan utilised well during her Gaelic football days have served her well in its cousin code.
He even tells us that her absence from the forward line was sorely felt by Cork during their one-point loss to Galway in the U16 All-Ireland final, just after her departure.
Michael Connolly says that he and the coaches at College Corinthians sought to ensure that all players got fair and equal game time, showing an understanding that youth sport is first and foremost about enjoyment, not competition.
Michael says that his involvement with College Corinthians' girls' football slowly fell off after the departure of his daughter, mainly due to the immense time commitment involved - however, they are getting things back up and running once more.
Colm Ó Duibhire is the new girls' team manager at College Corinthians and tells us that the club is experiencing a boom in participation in the aftermath of the WNT's success in reaching the 2023 World Cup.
Certainly there's been a surge over the last few years in general. I think that has coincided with the increased profile of the women's team. We got a big bounce with the World Cup last year as well.
Numbers are just on an upward trend the last few years. The interest and the profile that the girls would get, we'd see it more and more in the local papers and the national papers.
It varies, at school girl level we have nine teams from U11 to U17s. There'll be some overlap there, you could have a squad of 15-18 for each team, particularly at the younger ages.
Then, if you go to the academy, you're talking about a couple of hundred across all ages in our club alone. Then that's repeated across loads of other clubs.
The game for young girls in Ireland is booming, in tandem with the surge in interest in the women's national team.
Ó Duibhire and a group of coaches from the club are bringing along many of the girls' team players from College Corinthians to see their ex-prodigy Megan Connolly in action for the WNT on Tuesday night, in what he says is an exciting opportunity for the youngsters.
"Nobody that I've spoken to can recall Turners Cross, it didn't have the profile back then," says Ó Duibhire, "We're bringing a group of girls from the club, the U15s up. It's great to see. To see the actual Ireland internationals and Megan and Denise being from Cork, it makes it more real for these girls that that could be them in a couple of years."
It's easy to understand why Tuesday night's game will mean so much to the young footballers of Cork.
With the men's team last having played in Cork in 2016, and this being the first visit for the WNT in over a decade, the Munster region has been starved of international football.
It is hard to argue with the case for games more regularly being brought outside of Dublin, especially as the women's team continue to outgrow Tallaght Stadium.
Michael Connolly for one argues that the visit of the Ireland WNT to Cork should not be a one-off, citing the success of England's recent visits to Newcastle and Norwich as an example of how to spread the appeal of the game across the nation.
For Michael and the Connolly family, the GAA stadium in the east of the city will be a familiar venue. Megan's brother, Luke, lined out for the Cork county football team for over six years and continued playing with Nemo Rangers right up until this past year.
He was on the pitch for the absurd 2020 Munster semi-final, in which Cork snatched victory from the jaws of defeat against Kerry. A similar piece of magic in the Páirc on Tuesday would not go amiss for Eileen Gleeson's Ireland team.
8 November 2020; Luke Connolly of Cork in action against Paul Murphy of Kerry during the Munster GAA Football Senior Championship Semi-Final match between Cork and Kerry at SuperValu Páirc Uí Chaoimh in Cork. Photo by Brendan Moran/Sportsfile
Luke has since moved to spend a year in Australia, the site of the fond memories of summer 2023 for the Ireland women's team. Sadly, the ex-Rebels footballer will be missing when the Connolly family makes the trek down the Blackrock Road on Tuesday to cheer on his sister.
The family will be hoping to see Megan Connolly in the team for Tuesday night's game after the Bristol City star failed to see a minute of game time in Norwich on Friday.
Michael rarely travels to away games but made the trek to Carrow Road, so he was understandably fuming when he didn't even see his daughter take the pitch. He tells us, however, that it's all part of the game - and that it is a testament to the strength of the Irish squad.
Managers have to pick teams, I was going mad Megan didn't play the other night but that's the way it is. I'll be hoping she plays tomorrow night. You always want to try and see your daughter play.
Whether she plays or not isn't the be all and end all, Megan is a team player. She'll be there for a long time yet.
Connolly may well return to the starting lineup against France, on what is set to be a memorable day for the squad's Cork contingent.
The extended family - grandchildren, nieces, nephews, et al - will be in the stadium when the teams take to the field on Tuesday. And, as Michael tells us, the one man missing may be the one man on the receiving end of a slagging.
"She can slag her brother now that she played in Páirc Uí Chaoímh," he says, "but he didn't play in the Aviva!"
Ireland v France kicks off at 6pm on Tuesday from SuperValu Páirc Uí Chaoímh, with coverage on RTÉ 2.
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