Ladies Gaelic Football

20 // Ladies Gaelic Football Association SENIOR PLAYERS PLAYER OF THE YEAR PEIL Winter | Issue No 4 | Volume 14 the most important thing is that you keep building from match to match which we continued to do. "We arrived into the Final with good tests along the way and it just worked out well for us. You never really know how it's going to go." Three months on from the Final, the Dublin skipper admits she has yet to watch the All-Ireland decider back again. She caught a few minutes during the team celebrations, but their first victory over Cork in the Brendan Martin Cup showpiece has been put aside for another day. "The game was on in the background when we were in the Boar's Head on the Monday afternoon after the final and I caught little pieces of it here and there. But I haven't sat down and gone through it in terms of analysing it," Aherne says. "Maybe over Christmas I might sit down with a more reflective mode but analysis wise, I'm sure it will be fed back into us next year. Anyway, it might make it as one of the games of the year, so it might be on TV anyway over Christmas. "Some of the smaller details have definitely faded from the memory but you probably aren't as aware of how the game looks or how it's going when you're playing in it. You knew you were in a pretty intense match and the crowd was very involved in it. That was great to see that it was an exciting game. You obviously remembered the feelings beforehand and the feelings afterwards...getting back into the dressing room together was amazing." So where now for the player voted as the game's best in 2018 by her peers? Three All-Ireland medals, a League winner's medal, seven All Stars and Players' Player of the Year is a serious haul. But the big one missing for Aherne is a Dublin club title with St Sylvester's – and she'd love to complete the set. "Foxrock-Cabinteely beat us by three points in the Dublin quarter-final which was back in the early part of the summer. We were out of championship after that but we had a few League matches to finish off and we played up until the end of October. "We haven't won a senior championship with St Sylvester's. We are a mix of younger and other players right now. We're not that long in senior but we've held our own since we got there. "I don't know if it will happen when I'm still playing or not, but it would be nice to think that it could. It was a disappointing defeat this season to Fox-Cab though." Aherne works as a tax manager with KPMG and after she led Dublin to the 2017 All-Ireland she featured in a short video for her employer's website. On it she said her motto was 'What's your why?'. So what drives her to be the best and why is she still keen to push her game to higher standards in her 17 th season as an inter-county player? "When we were losing finals it was with the bunch of players that I still believe we had the potential to win. You didn't want to leave it like that and go out with that being your memory of those players that you played with. "Then when you're successful it's nearly the same: you want to bottle that feeling and keep it going for as long as you can, because the group of players that you're playing with are driven on by themselves and the management. "So it's real special to be part of something like that. You just want to hold onto it for as long as you can. "The challenge is to do it again. Cork managed to do that so successfully for years, but anytime you have a victory you have to improve because everyone is chasing hard. There is really not that much between the top five or six teams in the country. It's all about changing and adapting and trying to do it again."

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