By Daire Walsh

A little over eight months on from finally getting their hands on the Brendan Martin Cup at the same venue, Aoife Dillane and her Kerry team-mates will make a welcome return to Croke Park later on today.

After emerging on the wrong side of the result against Meath and Dublin in the 2022 and 2023 deciders, the Kingdom eventually claimed their 12th TG4 All-Ireland senior football championship title with a 3-14 to 0-11 win over Galway on August 4 of last year. Austin Stacks star Dillane played a starring role in defence during this game and also got forward for a goal in the closing seconds of the opening half.

Over the course of the past four years, Kerry have played at Croke Park on a grand total of eight occasions. Dillane has been part of the panel for each of these encounters and in advance of their Lidl National Football League Division 1 final against Armagh this evening (throw-in 5pm), she acknowledged the Kingdom now feel a lot more at ease playing in GAA HQ.

“It’s another fantastic opportunity to run out in Croke Park. We wouldn’t turn our nose up to that at any time. You might say we stumbled into a league final again this year, but we’re delighted to be back and going back up the road to Croke Park. It will be interesting going back now this time of year,” Dillane remarked.

“It’s obviously a very unique venue and we’re blessed to have been able to go up and down the road there so much. There are players that will finish their career and may never have played in Croke Park.

“I think the whole Croke Park nerves that come with it is kind of gone at this stage. I think we’re able to very much just view it as another game of football in a venue on the day.”

While Kerry’s regular phase campaign in Division 1 began and ended with defeats to today’s opponents Armagh and Dublin respectively, a run of five straight victories either side of these losses helped the Munster outfit to reach a top-tier league showpiece for the third consecutive season.

Whereas Dillane and Kerry earned an NFL Division 1 title with a convincing win over Galway in 2023, Armagh had the measure of them in last year’s league showdown in Croke Park. Although the Kingdom got the better of the Orchard County at the semi-final stage of the 2024 All-Ireland senior championship, the Ulster side served up a reminder of their quality by defeating Kerry on a score of 3-11 to 1-13 at Austin Stack Park in the opening round of the 2025 league.

“I think we were six points up at one stage during that first round of the National League. It was our first game out under the new management. We hadn’t been back training long at that stage. By the time management were ratified and stuff, we were a few weeks behind compared to other years.

“We were disappointed that day, but we took an awful lot of learnings from that game. Maybe even more so than had we ran away with it in the end. We kind of switched off by the end and Armagh just came back at us.

“We’ve been playing Armagh long enough now to know that you can’t give them an inch, because they’ll take a mile. They did that day in Austin Stack Park and they just caught us that day. In hindsight, we learnt an awful lot from it.”

As Dillane alludes to, Kerry are under new management for 2025 after her Austin Stacks club-mate Darragh Long and Declan Quill brought their joint stewardship of the side to an end in the wake of last year’s All-Ireland success.

Dillane’s fellow Tralee native Mark Bourke - albeit he is a member of the Na Gaeil club in the town - has now assumed the hot seat and he has guided his county to another national final within a few months of taking over as team boss.

“I wouldn’t have come across him before. I never had any interactions with him on the football field, it was all new. I didn’t really know much about him. Only that he has quite a built up CV now at this stage,” Dillane said of Bourke.

“He has been involved in mostly men’s teams around Kerry. It was a nice change and it was nice to get some new perspectives in on the team. We’ve been learning a lot from him and I’m sure he’s been learning a lot off us over the last eight or nine weeks now.”

Even allowing for the fact she recently stepped away from basketball club Tralee Warriors – who faced Cork outfit Glanmire in a BIDL Plate final in Dublin yesterday evening – Dillane has plenty on her plate at the moment.

Currently in her third year of a primary school teaching course at Mary Immaculate College, Limerick, she captained the Treaty County institution to a Giles Cup crown at last month’s AIG HEC O’Connor Cup Championships at Queen’s University in Belfast.

Selected at centre half-back (one of several positions she has played in for Kerry in this year’s NFL), Dillane exerted her influence in a 3-9 to 1-8 final victory at the expense of UCD. Her performances in this competition were so strong that she earned a spot in an AIG HEC All Star team that contained 11 players from the top-tier O’Connor Cup.

“That was a fantastic honour. One I really wasn’t expecting this year at all. The names that were there were mostly girls who are playing in the O’Connor Cup. It was a lovely honour. I said to someone, I think sometimes as footballers we don’t always appreciate the personal accolades,” added Dillane, who was joined in winning a HEC All Star by her MIC team-mates Lydia McDonagh and Rachel Dwyer.

“That was a really special win. I’m in my third year now in Mary I, so I’ll be going into my final year in September. To be captain of the team, they’re a fantastic squad up in Limerick. It has been a crazy few months.”

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