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‘I found it extremely hard’ – Mayo legend Cora Staunton on Aussie quarantine and the emotional trauma of Bríd Stack’s injury

Staunton has risen to the challenge of numerous setbacks on her travels that put Phileas Fogg in the ha’penny place

Cora Staunton

Conor McKeon Twitter Email

April 14 2021 08:06 PM

Take your pick as to the most remarkable thing about Cora Staunton being named on the AFLW’s Team of the Year – not quite the All-Stars of Aussie Rules, but fair going all the same.

The age angle is obvious enough. At 39, Staunton happens to be four days Stephen Cluxton’s senior. She is also currently the oldest player in a league where the average age is around 25.

When Emily Pease, one of her GWS Giants teammates, was born in 2002, Staunton had already played seven years of senior inter-county football with Mayo.

Then there’s the injury. That injury. The one she refuses to use as an excuse. The quadruple leg break that probably should have ended her elite sporting career only two years ago but didn’t.

“I don’t like to put the injury down as a reason why I might not play well,” Staunton reiterates. “But maybe confidence-wise, in the first couple of games this season, I wasn’t really sure where the leg was at.”

Bríd Stack, pictured here in 2018, who narrowly escaped paralysis in an Aussie Rules tackle. Photo by Piaras Ó Mídheach / Sportsfile

After an unavoidably poor start, Giants failed to make the play-offs this year, reducing Staunton’s competitive output to just nine games, at least two of which she confesses to being ill-prepared for.

And that’s before you consider the injury suffered by Bríd Stack and the emotional toll the episode took on Staunton.

As the only other Irish player at the club – and someone who had facilitated Stack coming to Australia – Staunton felt responsible when the former Cork star suffered a stable fracture of the C7 vertebra during a practice match in January.

“Everyone tells you it’s not your fault and you tell yourself it’s not your fault,” Staunton explains.

“But there is huge guilt at the time.

“For the first week or so, I had this real feeling of guilt. And I had this feeling that I needed to help her in any way I could and help her husband and her child in any way possible.

“When you’re that far from home and you get a serious injury like that, you need people close to you,” she stresses, referencing the gruesome leg break in 2019. Not that I knew Bríd really well before she came over, but being Irish … there is an association, you feel like you know each other really well.

“The first week, maybe first ten days, I found it extremely hard. We were living in a hotel. She had a little child running around and she’s in a neck brace and in a lot of pain. I just wanted to try and help in any way I could. I felt I had to.”

And that was only one aspect of a spectacularly disruptive pre-season, albeit the most traumatic part.

Covid restrictions meant Staunton couldn’t land in Australia until December 8, at which point eight weeks of pre-season had been missed.

Next began a 14-day hotel quarantine, from which she was finally released on Christmas Day.

Soon after that, the Giants team were forced to suddenly relocate to Albery in New South Wales into a temporary ‘hub’ after the announcement of a regionalised lockdown in Sydney.

Given the public health situation, the AFL had provisions in place for such an eventuality. But as it went, the Giants were the only team in the league forced away from their home ground, their training base, their homes and – for most players and staff in a semi-professional league – their jobs.

“We didn’t have nearly as many staff in the hub as they would have had in Sydney. We were down coaches, medical people. One of our squad couldn’t come because her (job) training wouldn’t have allowed it.”

At one stage, due to a cancelled flight, the squad landed in Adelaide to play a pre-season game at 11 o’clock at night. The match was fixed for noon the following day.

That was the game in which Stack suffered the broken vertebra.

“Then you had the tribunal and the way that the storyline changed from Bríd being the victim to being the villain in the space of a day or two,” Staunton recalls.

“She struggled with some of the stuff that was being said on social media. She had to remove herself from it for a while. Some of the stuff that was coming at her wasn’t very nice.

“There she is with a broken neck, halfway around the world, with a very young family. She signed up to come to Sydney to play football. But at the time, we hadn’t even reached Sydney yet.”

Between quarantine and hubs, Staunton was eight-and-a-half weeks on the road, effectively living out of a suitcase, whilst attempting to prepare for the season.

“If you’re a bit like me and you love routine and you like a nice clean house and everything in its right place, that’s not really possible,” she notes.

Staunton left Ireland on December 7. She eventually unpacked her bags in mid-February.

Mayo to Sydney in only slightly less time than it took Phileas Fogg to circumnavigate the globe.

“It was hard,” she admits. “But I enjoyed it once we got back to Sydney. Once we got back to routine and normal living.

“I’m just not sure I’d be able to go through the start of it again..”

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‘I found it extremely hard’ – Mayo legend Cora Staunton on Aussie quarantine and the emotional trauma of Bríd Stack’s injury

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