ENDA MCEVOY: The hard work just starting for Tribe
“Congrats,” the well-wisher declared. “Ye were a breath of fresh air this year. The team of the championship. But you do realise the real hard work only starts now?”
Being the gentleman he is, Cunningham smiled, located his passenger and went on his way. It wasn’t as though he needed telling about his charges’ place in the scheme of things in the first place. Galway the team of Championship 2012? Absolutely. Galway the team of Championship 2013? No county knows better than this one that good performances one summer are no guarantee of good performances the following summer. A lot done, yes. A lot more to do.
To return to a question posed here in the aftermath of the All-Ireland replay: would the challengers have been better off losing to Kilkenny by a point on September 9?
The answer, now as then, has to be an unequivocal ‘no’.
A narrow defeat would have led to a less painful winter, certainly. It would also have led to a less honest one. On which note, any Galway folk still deriving succour from the fact the Tribesmen received more All Stars than Kilkenny should burn that particular comfort blanket here and now. The breakdown of the All Stars was a statistic, not some profound statement by the selectors.
You want a statistic? Here are three that really matter from last September. Four of the Galway forwards failed to score from play in the drawn game. Not one of them managed a point from play in normal time in the replay. And Joe Canning went 130 minutes — from the 10th minute of the drawn game to injury-time in the replay — without scoring from play.
It would be wrong to be overly harsh. The replay was Galway’s Arnhem. A bridge too far. No shame in that. But those are the statistics that will inform the county’s challenge in 2013.
Some of the goalposts have moved. While one harbours no doubts about Fergal Moore — their best performer in 2012 — revisiting the same heights, Johnny Coen is now a man with an All Star and a reputation and, as in the All-Ireland replay, will be viewed by opponents as the first defender to be closed down. Iarla Tannian, up to last summer a byword for inconsistency, faces the task of following up a fine season with another fine season.
Most pressing of all, however, is the issue in attack. The team that had raised 23 white flags against Offaly, 21 in the Leinster final and 22 against Cork, were reduced to 13 and 11 at Croke Park in September. This is not the mid-1990s any more; 13 and 11 points, irrespective of how many goals are appended to them, no longer win championship matches.
A by the by on Tannian. The feeling appears to be abroad in Galway that Kilkenny lowered the blade in the replay. Tannian was unquestionably caught late at the throw-in, but he proceeded to spend the rest of the game running around trying to exact revenge on whichever Kilkenny man happened to be passing. If nothing else, the afternoon should have brought home to him that revenge is a dish best served cold. The only place for a player to have the last laugh is on the scoreboard. And only the Galway players themselves can ensure 2012 doesn’t become another case, like 2001 and 2005, of once in a maroon moon.
And yet, and yet. All of the above receipted and filed, take Kilkenny out of the equation and Galway are as well placed as anyone to prosper. And one thing neither county will be doing any time soon, as indicated by recent exploits of St Thomas’s on the one hand and the successes of Clara and Thomastown in the All-Ireland intermediate and junior championships on the other, is to run short of numbers.
It is not an appetising-looking National League. Think less Neven Maguire and more your local chipper. Starts this weekend, a break next weekend, then four weekends, then a three-week break till the semi-finals. The first phase finishes on March 31. Ludicrous. At least Division 1B, which features Dublin, Limerick, Offaly and Wexford, with dog eating dog all over the place, has something to recommend it. If someone finishes that group unbeaten, it’ll be quite a feat.
Absent friends compound the general sense of ennui. Nobody will be mourned more than John Mullane, but Waterford will miss Stephen Molumphy’s quiet, unshowy intelligence as much as they’ll miss Mr I Love Me County himself.
Of Cork’s multiple losses, meanwhile, none has more depressing long-term implications for the county than that of Darren Sweetnam. He may have been an athlete as much as a hurler but, as Eamonn Cregan pointed out the other day, this is now a game of athletes.
No manager will thus be under as much scrutiny over the coming weeks as Jimmy Barry-Murphy. As for Eamon O’Shea, one imagines he’s busy as much with psychology work at the moment as with coaching. Getting Lar to delete his Twitter account would be a start.
Is it possible that Kilkenny, injury-riddled tomorrow and facing a trip to Thurles in a fortnight, will enter the third weekend of the competition without a point to their name? It is.
Is it too obvious to say that Waterford will end up bottom of the top division? Probably not.
Is it outlandish to posit that Clare could reach the final? Hardly. After all, they’re more forward for the time of year than any other team.
Just for the sake of it, we’ll hazard a Tipp/Clare final. With Anthony Cunningham and his players redoubling their efforts all the while.
