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.
Since their last All-Ireland in 2001, Galway have resembled a once-great Premiership club, whose fans (and sometimes - it can appear - its players) are living in a sepia-tinted past. An Arsenal of sorts. Successive managers from both inside and out the county attempted to tackle the beast and, every now and then, hearts would be set a flutter with the unveiling of a new wunderkind - a Sean Armstrong of a Nicky Joyce - followed by a timely humiliation of Mayo, only for it all to fall dramatically flat. All in time for race week. It was so commonplace, it became a cliche. While a midsummer loss for Mayo meant a chance to meditate on failure and regroup, for Galway it usually meant an exodus to San Fran and Nantucket.
And inevitably, a new manager.
Kevin Walsh, to his credit, was brave enough to try new things, such as actually defending, a concept seemingly beneath the team before his arrival. To many, it was heresy - an abandonment of the Galway way. He had some successes, but the autumn was to him what the Russian winter was to the Germans. He almost always had Mayo’s number. Regardless, when it mattered most, Mayo almost always outlasted his Tribesmen.
So, it has fallen to one of the purest of North Galway thoroughbreds to buck the trend. However his stewardship of Galway concludes, Pádraic Joyce is a bona fide hall-of-famer. There may have been more talented footballers on that Galway team he dominated from 1998 to 2012, but there were none cuter. He had the onfield acumen of an alleycat. He knew himself, he knew the opposition and he knew the refs, and, as was evidenced in his ability to quarterback as he played, he knew the shortcomings of those around him. To watch him captain his club Killererin was like watching Pep Guardiola coach Bayern Munich. They trusted him, and he invariably delivered for a club that overachieved for a decade.
Something with this Galway team, however, has been amiss. Or worse; all too typical. His charges were flying when COVID hit two years ago. Sure, it was “only the league”, but the coup de grace of that first campaign should’ve been them relegating Mayo in a critical league match in Tuam. Events, etc., and some seven months later the re-fixture ended in a massacre, one from which Galway couldn’t recover.
His sophomore season was more of the same. Early promise. Late disappointment. There were mutterings of a velvet revolution during the off-season. The arrival of Cian O'Neill could well have been a conciliatory touch. An admission that something was in fact amiss. And that’s the rub. Galway and Joyce will soon be running out of excuses. Sean Kelly looks elite. His brother Paul has huge potential. Shane Walsh, Robert Finnerty and a fit Damian Comer are serious offensive weapons. Young Tomó Culhane looks like a prospect a team like Mayo and a dozen others could well do with. Matthew Tierney had a breakout season last year. Peter Cooke is a specimen. Galway and Joyce are on the edge of something. Whether it’s great or grim, is up to them.
