Colin Sheridan: Still trying to decode the great enigma that is Galway football
Galway players and manager Pádraic Joyce, return to the field after half-time during the Connacht FBD League Final against Roscommon at the Connacht Air Dome
For a number of years now, the ambition of a group of young men from out west has become everyone's sleeper New Year's resolution. Join a gym. Have a dry January. Visit granny more. Be a better friend. Break up with our phones. Believe in Galway footballers. A sort of collective amnesia sweeps over people as we blindly ignore the delusions of 12 months previous. We are so beat down by life - the gluttony and excess of Christmas as well as our myriad of failures as people over the past year - we will convince ourselves that anything is possible, our rationale being, if we’re half right, we’ll be a whole half better off than we were last year. And so it is with Galway. We look at the brochure they send us and see compelling evidence for believing in them. Recent underage success! Shane Walsh’s feet! Damian Comer’s shoulders! Pádraic Joyce's wily game-brain! More than all of these things, they represent a stomachable alternative to a depressing reality; we can’t watch Dublin win again. We can’t have Mayo let us down again. Kerry are too entitled, Tyrone too wholesome and deserving. Galway? They look good and play right and make us feel better about ourselves. In January, when we need it most. It matters not that, like the gym membership we swore would change our lives, our belief in Galway usually fades with the last snows of spring. The longer the evenings, the shorter our memories. By late summer, as Mayo defy logic, Galway dutifully fulfil the dreaded prophecy of disappointment. The resolution inevitably dies, but the direct debit remains.
I have never been personally affected by this condition of trusting false prophets clad in maroon and white. I am, as Aaron Rodgers would say, “immunised”, not because I know better, but because I have a gear bag full of problems of my own. Being from Mayo, I have enough delusion in my life to fill a year of January’s. In fact - and I can only speak for myself in this regard - my new year's affirmations usually centre around giving up on false hope, ergo giving up on Mayo. Unlike Galway, Mayo usually give a man plenty of reason to doubt in winter. It starts a week after the season ends, and between off-field acrimony and onfield ineptitude lasts until mid-July, by which time I have abandoned cold objectivity for warm prejudice. So, I do get it. It’s just that with Mayo, hope only arrives when the silage is cut. In Galway, it comes with the first sign of a stretch in the evening. Year after year, no matter the evidence to the contrary, the want for a Galway revival grows. It’s not just Galway people who preach it, either. There is an element of wanting Brazil to be good again about the national affection for the county. The city prides itself as a refuge for artists and dreamers. The county that surrounds it boasts a tradition of footballers as warrior poets. Micahel Donnellan. Ja Fallon. Declan Meehan. There was nothing manufactured or contrived about their brilliance. No data to explain their genius. From the academy of St. Jarlaths, Tuam to the finishing school of UCG, this is a place where tradition has long mattered. So much so, it may well have held them back.
