Pearl Slattery

the funeral and stuff happens everyone else's life goes on but the girls are still grieving and i think people can forget that but for me we didn't win anything but as captain probably the proudest i've ever been see girls continue when you go through something like that to want to try and days later i want to play every week for the jersey and the crest and give everything

look that's all we did as a group last year you gave everything and personally you know you nearly want just to win more then because of that win something we felt like we deserved it but look football's ruthless at times you don't sometimes get what you deserve and credit that alone in the bigger games and they were just better than deserve champions and has to light a fire in the belly has to motivate you and we have a great group of people in the dressing room great players who will have learned from last year but also now it's a new campaign new opportunities and

We'll be going for everything this year and trying to compete and just taking it game by game.

We're not silly either.

We'll look forward to the President's Cup.

Give that a right go.

Great game before the league campaign starts.

And then, you know, Treaty live on TV, first weekend, then Tolke.

I mean, it doesn't get better than that.

So really looking forward to it.

Oh yeah, there's an expectation on us all the time, and I think looking for the league,

for everyone involved it's a great first fixture isn't a bit of storyline his extreme and stuff like that that's what you want you know i love that i love those games the expectation for me is always there when you play for shells in every game you know and we're a competitive group we're competitive in training and yeah when we rock up and talk the first game of the season of course we're expected to win but as i said to you some of your most difficult games last year were treaty and with good players obviously new management as well so

We'll give them the utmost respect, but we know that if we perform on our day, that'll be our main concern.

If we perform on our day, we're as good as anyone and we can beat anyone.

And I suppose that's our motivation over the next few weeks.

And Sean's been brilliant in saying that, you know, really work hard in pre-season.

So when you know you're starting the season, you've given everything in pre-season, you're ready to go, the expectation's there, but as I said, you're prepared as much as you can.

great just one final thing if i can ask you um i'm not sure have you had much experience in coaching younger players have you been involved in that side of things i'm talking about maybe school boy school girl kind of an age group um look i did a stint shell 16s at one stage when i was doing a coaching license and then i was in with james scott's under 17s irish squad for two seasons as well so yeah coaching kind of that 15 16 age group so

It's a tough one, isn't it?

It's a battle for everyone.