The lads have one more weekend of pre-season action coming up this weekend, but for the county’s women footballers, the serious stuff starts this coming Sunday.

The LGFA’s National Football League gets going this weekend and our first round game in Division One sees us up against Cork on Sunday. This match takes place at the Connacht GAA Centre of Excellence, where throw-in that afternoon is 1.30pm.

This is the first year since the Covid pandemic hit that a full schedule of LGFA League matches will be played. Our Division One campaign sees us involved in plenty of tasty encounters over the coming weeks, as the fixture list below confirms.

Oisín McGovern has a good League preview piece on the women’s team in this week’s Mayo News (here). This confirms the positive news that former Mayo captain Sarah Tierney and Rachel Kearns, the latter back both from Australia and injury, will be in the panel for the forthcoming League captain. So too will former panellist Clodagh McMananmon of Burrishoole, as well as Charlestown forward Deirdre Doherty, Burrishoole’s Maria Cannon and Saoirse Delaney of Aghamore, along with Emily Reape and Ciara Durkan of Knockmore.

On the negative side, Saoirse Lally, Tamara O’Connor, Aoife Geraghty and Sinéad Walsh will all miss Sunday’s game due to injury. Ciara White and goalkeeper Aisling Tarpey aren’t available for selection at the minute either, with the former currently taken up with studies while the latter has opted out for the duration of the NFL campaign.

Sponsors Lidl are once again this year putting a major push behind the women’s game. This was highlighted at a press event today – link here – where details of the TV and online coverage for the LGFA League campaign were announced.

We’ll have two League matches this spring televised live by TG4. The first of these is Saturday week’s Round 2 meeting with Kerry at the Connacht CoE while the other one is the game against Dublin on Saturday 28th February, a match that incidentally will be played up the road from us here at Whitehall Colmcille’s new pitch on Collins Avenue.

As well as having a number of League matches televised, the LGFA are streaming all the other League games, from all of the Divisions. Access is priced keenly, with game passes available for €5, weekend passes for €10 and season passes for only €50. This is extremely good value and the link for accessing these streams is here.

The best of luck to the Mayo women on Sunday and for all of their upcoming NFL campaign.