{"id":94795,"date":"2025-10-21T13:27:08","date_gmt":"2025-10-21T13:27:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/94795\/"},"modified":"2025-10-21T13:27:08","modified_gmt":"2025-10-21T13:27:08","slug":"mixed-injury-news-for-ireland-ahead-of-nations-league-playoff-against-belgium-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/94795\/","title":{"rendered":"Mixed injury news for Ireland ahead of Nations League playoff against Belgium \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ahead of naming her squad for the Nations League<\/a> playoff against Belgium, the first leg of which takes place at the Aviva Stadium on Friday evening, Carla Ward had a mixed bag of news to deal with on the player availability front<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The biggest loss was that of goalkeeper Courtney Brosnan, out with a knee injury, the biggest boost Denise O\u2019Sullivan\u2019s<\/a> return to fitness having not played for her club for two months.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo have lost Denise would have been catastrophic,\u201d said the head coach, \u201cI would argue she\u2019s one of the best players I\u2019ve ever worked with. She\u2019s unbelievable for us, on and off the pitch. Phenomenal. Can\u2019t you tell how happy I am that she\u2019s back in with us.\u201d<\/p>\n

O\u2019Sullivan played the last 20 minutes for North Carolina Courage at the weekend<\/a>, her first game-time since mid-August when she injured her knee. \u201cI was on quite a lot with their medical team,\u201d said Ward. \u201cWe were told she\u2019d be out [for the Belgian games], but I wasn\u2019t going to settle for that until the last minute.\u201d<\/p>\n

Brosnan\u2019s absence means Ward will have to choose between Grace Moloney, Sophie Whitehouse and Katie Keane as her stand-in, Keane\u2019s youth making the first two the more likely contenders. <\/p>\n

\u201cGrace and Sophie are in good form. From a data point of view, we\u2019re talking the top two goalkeepers in the WSL2 right now. They\u2019re both playing, they\u2019re both performing, they\u2019re both very different. So that is a big question mark \u2013 and honestly, that\u2019s not been decided yet.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"AthloneAthlone Town’s Kelly Brady celebrates after her side’s FAI Cup final win over Bohemians on Sunday. Photograph: Bryan Keane\/Inpho <\/p>\n

One player who is unlikely to feature in the games is Athlone Town\u2019s Kelly Brady, although she will train with the squad this week. Ward was in Tallaght on Sunday to see her score a hat-trick in the FAI Cup final win over Bohemians<\/a>, but while impressed by her ability, she says she\u2019ll only be included in the squad if injuries force other players to drop out. <\/p>\n

\u201cKelly\u2019s been impressive all season. Her athleticism is probably different to some of the other League of Ireland players that we\u2019ve looked at. Her movement in the box is unbelievable and she\u2019s got a leap that a lot of forwards would love to have.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut we\u2019ve spoken about it a lot, the difference between League of Ireland part-time football and full-time. The biggest gap is probably that athleticism and the physical side of it. We\u2019re quite heavy-loaded for that number nine spot, but it will be a really good chance to have a look at her this week, for sure.\u201d<\/p>\n

Where Ward has fewer options, she admits, is in midfield, Megan Connolly and Lily Agg are both absent through injury, while Ruesha Littlejohn has got just over an hour of football under her belt since joining Crystal Palace last month. She is, then, particularly pleased to welcome Jamie Finn back in to the fold, the 27-year-old returning to action for Sunderland last month after being out since February of last year when she tore her anterior cruciate ligament while training with Ireland<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"JamieJamie Finn in action for Ireland against Hungary in 2023. Photograph: Ryan Byrne\/Inpho <\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a big boost to have her back,\u201d said Ward. \u201cJamie\u2019s got a lot of match minutes under her belt this season and I\u2019ve been really impressed with the way she plays. It\u2019s an area of the pitch that we need to bring players through, so yeah, a real boost.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery single day during my ACL rehab, I thought about playing for Ireland. Honestly, it was what kept me going,\u201d said Finn who has 20 caps to her name. That rehab, she says, was \u201ctorture\u201d, mentally and physically. \u201cI thought I was resilient before, but this was a new level of resilience.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cTo have something that\u2019s been such a part of your life taken away in that one instant … it\u2019s quite hard to replace it with something that gives you the same rush as football. You need to just keep the end goal in sight, and the end goal for me was getting back playing football and getting back in to this camp. That was the last piece of the puzzle, but for me, probably the biggest piece.\u201d<\/p>\n

Remarkably, Finn is one of just four players in this squad, along with O\u2019Sullivan, Katie McCabe and Heather Payne, who started at Hampden Park three years ago this month in the World Cup qualifying playoff win over Scotland<\/a>. Brosnan and Agg are out injured, while Niamh Fahey, Louise Quinn, Diane Caldwell, Megan Campbell and \u00c1ine O\u2019Gorman have all since retired. <\/p>\n

\u201cYeah, we\u2019ve lost a good chunk of big characters in the dressingroom, but there\u2019s a lot of talent coming through, new players have come in. I kind of feel like a new player too, I\u2019ve been out for that long. Yeah, it\u2019s brilliant to be back.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ahead of naming her squad for the Nations League playoff against Belgium, the first leg of which takes…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":94796,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[18999,19001,61,60,59269,43,18998],"class_list":["post-94795","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-carla-ward","tag-denise-o-sullivan","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-nations-league","tag-news","tag-republic-of-ireland-wnt"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94795","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=94795"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94795\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/94796"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=94795"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=94795"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=94795"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}