New women’s soccer coach plays the long game

Maurice Farrell is the new coach at national women’s soccer league side, Cork Women’s FC. The Charleville man is not promising instant silverware, but believes he can help transform this talented fledgling outfit into one of the best teams in Ireland over the next four years.

Excitement is in the air at Cork Women’s FC ahead of their first game in the 2012-13 Bus Éireann Women’s National League on Sunday August 26th. Not only will the game take place in the crucible of local soccer, Turner’s Cross, but they will also be led by a new manager, Maurice Farrell, from Charleville, a man with a considerable reputation as a coach… and a club hurling player of note as well.

Maurice is as excited as the players and backroom staff at Cork Women’s FC. His enthusiasm for the challenge of building on the team’s third place finish in the inaugural 2011-12 league is palpable. And for the manager, his new appointment also amounts to a sort of homecoming.

“I was involved in coaching the Gaynor Cup under-age teams in Cork a few years ago, and also in the National Cup in 2007, when there was a Cork selection of the best players for the club teams entered. Now, seven or eight years on, it’s great to see that quite a few of the players, who were young kids at the time, are now playing for Cork Women’s FC—it’s actually quite an honour to see how they’ve preserved and are playing in one of the top three national league teams in the country,” he said.

Maurice also has the advantage of being accompanied to Cork Women’s FC by Derek O’Gorman as coach. When Farrell was coaching the Cork schoolboys teams that finished in the top three of the Kennedy Cup competitions of 2003 and 2010, O’Gorman was the manager. “It’s great to be working together with Derek at Cork Women’s FC, and we’re both really looking forward to the challenge,” he said.

The immediate challenge for the pair, and all the club—“we are all prepared to make the effort to support Chris (O’Mahony, the Cork Women’s FC chairman) in his efforts to build the club,” he says—is not to capture silverware, but to copperfasten their impressive achievements during their inaugural season.