LORNA MCNamara has been named as the April PwC GPA Women’s Player of the Month.
Feakle/Killanena clubwoman Lorna was one of the driving forces behind Clare’s success in Division 1B of the Centra National Camogie League.
She scored 2-6 from Clare’s 3-11 total helped exorcise the ghosts of last year’s loss to Antrim at the same stage and provided the first piece of silverware for Eugene Foudy in his first season as manager.
Armagh’s Blaithin Mackin won the ladies football equivalent with Stephen Bennett of Waterford and Down captain Odhran Murdock winning the hurling and gaelic football gongs. The April awards recognise the country’s top performers from the National League finals, as well as those making an impact in the early stages of the 2026 All-Ireland Championships.
GPA CEO Tom Parsons said; “These awards are voted for by players themselves and that makes the PwC Player of the Month Awards very special. While our games are all about the team, I hope Lorna, Blaithin, Stephen and Odhran take some personal satisfaction in being recognised this way by their peers. Their contributions to their teams during the month of April make them very worthy recipients”.
Twenty four year old Lorna has been sidelined for the best part of two years with a groin injury. Her return was helped by Femoroacetabular Impingement (FAI) surgery while she admitted the chronic pain is ongoing. “It’s just a matter of managing the load and just preparing for matches and training when I can, really. If I’ve trained in the evening, I’m up in the morning before work, basically doing a warm-up session in the gym just to try and get a bit of movement in. I try to keep the steps up throughout the day, and activation before training, as well. No one has really told me exactly what it is,” she continues.
“It’s sort of a tendinopathy on my adductor, so just there in my groin. It’s just a matter of warming it up really well before games and even half a bottle of deep heat, if you like. At training, I should only really stick to the hurling, but there’s times where you feel guilty for missing out on the running session, so you do a running session. Next morning you wake up and it’s at you again. A lot of the time, if I manage it well, I can wake up the next day and be fine to train again whenever it’s on. But when it does flare up, it just takes a little bit of time to get right again,” she added.
Clare are hopeful of a long summer in this year’s All-Ireland championship, Lorna said. “It’ll be tough to make it out of our own group. It’s five games we have, so we’ll just have to put the head down and really work hard to try and make it out of our own group. We have three games in a row, so you really know where you’re going to stand after those three games. Hopefully, if we win those, the pressure is off for the last two games, but it is going to be a big battle, definitely, between all of us. If we do (get through), you never know what can happen in a quarter-final”.
