They had to face the final hurdle in order to pull it off, but Waterford's ladies' footballers will once again play senior football in 2024.
A challenging 2023 Championship saw them drawn along with Meath and Donegal in what was always going to be a steep hill to climb. Losses to the then defending All-Ireland Champions as well as a loss to Donegal had their backs to the wall, despite having surmounted both sides in the league.
On Saturday last, Pat Sullivan's Déise were 14 points to the good of Cavan in Crettyard to seal their status at the top table, but the manager was frank in his assessment of their year saying they were "disappointed to be here."
Waterford could have avoided going the hard route if they had managed to beat Tipp in the first of the relegation playoffs. They were a point short in Piltown, losing fourteen points to thirteen with Sullivan remarking at the time that they "had enough chances in normal time to win the game, the same scenario going into injury time and extra time and we didn't take that either. We have no one to blame only ourselves."
While they could have avoided it, they found themselves in the crunch decider nonetheless, but as Sullivan remarked, "We really dug deep this week and we looked into ourselves and said 'look, we know we're good enough, we know we should be in Division 1, we know we should be senior,' but we had to come out against a really strong Cavan team who were going to come and throw everything."
Carrying a lead into the halftime break was crucial in their success with Sadhbh Hallinan palming to the net after 20 minutes and ultimately sending them to the changing rooms 1.08 to 0.03 up.
In the second half, Sullivan notes, they took off the shackles and started to play football. 12 points went over the Cavan bar in the second period but the manager lamented that they had missed "probably another three goals."
Sullivan hit the nail on the head saying that they were happy to get the result but were simultaneously "not happy that we were here to get that performance."
Cavan were content to sit back and defend, especially in the first half, proving difficult for the Déise to make inroads in attack. Sullivan said after the game that their plan was to push up the field and "defend from the corner forward line." Once they threw the shackles off and committed to breaking down their opponents they started to reap the rewards.
"They kept four players back there all day and it gave us so much room outside the D and you see Kelly Ann Hogan there in the first half kicking four or five points outside the D which is super. Put them under pressure then and they had to come out and that opened up the room for us," Sullivan noted.
Aside from the relegation battle which resulted from the losses in the All-Ireland series, it has been far from plain sailing for the management team. They lost Megan Dunford early in the campaign and she is unlikely to feature for a significant period owing to her serious knee injury.
While the star defender was unavailable for the later half of the season, there were several more players unavailable from day one. Sullivan notes that they had to rebuild the panel with some 14 players not continuing from last year.
With all the hurdles they had to face in 2023, the main takeaway is that the county will still be playing senior football next season. Sullivan points out the danger of going down to intermediate and the slippery slope it can be to try and climb back up once again.
"If I look at the teams that went down last year, they haven't even made the semi-finals at intermediate. Monaghan went down last year and Westmeath, and look at them - they haven't even got in there. That shows you, if you go down there is no guarantee you'll come up, and you could end up down there for five, six or seven years. There's too much talent in Waterford to leave that go down the drain today and I'm so happy that the players stood up and proved it."
