How Galway’s hurlers found guts and glory
He’s been as good as his word.
Fourteen months ago, Joe Canning sat in a circle with the Galway team the Tuesday after another Leinster final defeat to Kilkenny, his thumbs bridging his chin. For only the second time in his senior championship career, he had been held scoreless from play, cutting a peripheral, subdued figure at full forward, while outside the refuge of that hotel meeting room, a hurricane of public and media criticism was blowing, with one famous Clare man dismissing the team as simply gutless.
“First of all, I’d like to apologise for my own performance,” a sombre Canning told his team-mates before matter-of- factly, almost breezily, adding: “It’ll never happen again.”
In that declaration he set a tone for the meeting, and, you could say, for everything that has followed. With such an expression of humility yet confidence, every other player could only feel empowered by his accountability and example.
The team needed to hear it and even more of it because at that time they were in a vulnerable place. The meeting had started off with captain David Burke capturing the raw hurt and frustration the team was feeling. It was now a case of how to channel it. If it was misdirected, then they would simply fulfil the prophesy of all the doom merchants and they’d exit again at the All Ireland quarter-final stage, just as the previous three Galway sides to reach an All-Ireland final had the following season.
A senior player told his team-mates to remember how they’d felt leaving Johnstown House 10 days earlier. In all his years playing with Galway he couldn’t recall a better or more professional training camp. While it had failed in its short-term mission of delivering the Bob O’Keeffe Cup, all that good work hadn’t been undone; it would still stand to them.
Others were more downbeat, though. The previous Sunday had been too much of the same old story, too much like the previous year’s All-Ireland final. After Kilkenny’s goal, said one player, everyone’s heads had dropped.
At that point a member of the management challenged that presumption: Had everyone’s heads dropped? After Kilkenny went four points ahead Galway had rallied to score the next three points.
Damien Joyce, the former player and now a key member of the stats-management team, further broke down the facts of the game to challenge the lazier shorthand narrative that the public would have understandably subscribed to.
While there were similarities with the previous year’s All-Ireland final, it crucially wasn’t quite the same.
This time there had been no immediate collapse after half-time; rather than brace themselves for any imminent black-and-amber onslaught, Galway, for the first 10 minutes of the second half, had maintained their three-point interval advantage.
Kilkenny then had a period of dominance alright, but, as had already been noted, Galway’s response to Jonjo Farrell’s goal was to rattle off three consecutive points.
The issue was with what happened over the following seven minutes.
In that time Kilkenny stretched their lead from one point out to six. But a large part of Galway’s slippage could be attributed to fatigue, probably because their pre-season had been curtailed by the protracted nature of Anthony Cunningham’s eventual departure. Another vital member of the stats-backroom team, Dave Morris, illustrated how in those last 20 minutes their tackle count rate dropped by almost 50%, but in those first 54 minutes it had been through the roof.
Only Kilkenny on the same day had a higher tackle count all year. Galway’s, despite that last quarter-lapse, had been next.
In breaking down the game in such an exact, surgical manner, Joyce and Morris cut off at the legs any unnecessary demons that could have lingered in the minds of the players. The data told the story. How could a team with such a tackle count and workrate be gutless?
That has been one of the features and achievements of Micheál Donoghue’s management. Early into the project they identified that for these players to do something no other Galway team had done in over a quarter of a century, they had to think differently, especially about how they viewed themselves and performances, both victory and defeat.
That meant often challenging them. There have been times after victories over the last two seasons where the players have been no sooner been out of the showers and changed when Joyce and Morris have been showing them video clips of an aspect of their performance that was unsatisfactory.
But it also meant challenging lazy stereotypes of themselves that they themselves could come to believe in. Have the hurlers but not the men. All flair, no fight. Inconsistent. Gutless. If they listened enough to everyone else, they’d come to believe everyone else.
The negative loop had to be broken. While a sizeable share of commentators and supporters would inevitably catastrophise — “Galway never put back-to-back seasons together, Galway always follow up a good year with a bad one” — the group itself would localise.
The Leinster final hadn’t been a disaster. They had suffered a lapse, not a collapse, and one they’d remedy, like getting in some more fitness work over the following two weeks. The outlook was either they’d win or learn or they’d lose and learn. Regardless, they’d keep going forward until they got to where they wanted.
When they did last Sunday, Donoghue paid tribute to the resilience the players would have shown even when the outside world would have viewed them as chumps, not champs.
He’d have been thinking of someone like Colm Callanan who didn’t play with Galway until he was 25, was cut adrift at 29, but came back to win an All Star at 33; was that not a model of mental toughness? Or Gearóid McInerney, who hadn’t started a single championship match for Galway until he was 26 but still kept chasing the dream. Or Davy Glennon, who days after the 2015 Leinster final checked himself into treatment for gambling addiction and 12 months later was back starting in a Leinster final; how could someone after the journey he’d undertaken be dismissed as gutless?
That meeting in that Athenry hotel concluded with some words from the selector Noel Larkin, one of those naturally positive, buoyant people that Donoghue shrewdly recognised every setup should have.
Larkin had been in this situation before. A Portumna team he’d coached to an
All-Ireland had lost an early-round game the same season. So had a Roscommon team that he’d guided up the steps of the Hogan Stand to collect the Nicky Rackard Cup. And in that circle in that hotel in Athenry, he told the Galway players that he was full sure they would win the All-Ireland as well. He’d loved being back in Croke Park for that Leinster final. Big day, big game.
The upside of losing it was that they now had another big game in just three weeks’ time, instead of having to wait for five.
Win it and they were back in Croke Park.
A bad seven-minutes hadn’t wavered his belief.
Galway wouldn’t win that 2016 All-Ireland, losing to Tipperary in the semi-final by a point, but Brendan Cummins recently remarked how he sensed there was a difference about how Galway departed Croke Park that day. They’d been beaten but not defeated.
It was a shrewd observation. Instead of wallowing in misery, Galway were already looking ahead. When the team went back to the Regency Hotel for some food and a couple of drinks, Francis Forde, the team’s brilliant coach, could be seen endearingly catching McInerney by the neck, telling him and a few backroom members in the vicinity that they’d found a real player now.
The infectiously-upbeat Larkin was already talking about winning the following year’s league and telling a couple of subs that they’d be the ones that management would be looking to drive that campaign.
That’s a phrase you hear from Donoghue the whole time: The players are the one driving it. But he has done a masterful job in creating that environment while another huge source of confidence for those players is the tactical acumen of the management.
After the team’s victory over Clare in Thurles last year, a couple of senior players mentioned to each other that they’d lost three previous All-Ireland quarter-finals in Thurles to a Davy Fitzgerald team because they had been outfoxed.
This time, with Donoghue, Larkin, and Forde on the line, Galway had outsmarted Fitzgerald.
Fitzgerald would exact some form of revenge the following February, bringing a Wexford team to Salthill and steal promotion from Division 1B, but in the aftermath Donoghue remained true to the template of the previous summer. Don’t catastrophise. Localise and learn.
That Leinster final defeat would prove to be a watershed for another reason. After a discussion with Donoghue, Canning was moved out to centre forward where his creativity has flourished. While the days of having to rack up 1-5 from play may be gone, he’s never failed to score from play either since that declaration he made in that circle in that hotel in Athenry.
Leaving anyone accusing him or Galway of being gutless left to echo his own words from that day: Apologies for that, I promise it’ll never happen again.
