Credit Donoghue for trusting his players
Waterford were coming at Galway in waves but Burke shouted to the three boys; “Not today. Not again today.” It was a perfect metaphor for the Galway performance. Galway didn’t surrender or falter yesterday. It was their day at last, beautiful and glorious.
Burke led the charge. He hadn’t been having a great season up to yesterday but he grabbed the game by the scruff of the neck and was its outstanding player. You have to give great credit to Kevin Moran and Jamie Barron but Burke was the outstanding midfielder on show. He knew yesterday needed to be different. He had to be. So did Galway. And they were.
It was no means a vintage performance but that is what winning All-Irelands, especially after a long famine, is all about. Galway conceded two sloppy goals.
Colm Callanan wouldn’t have been happy with the second one but I was watching the match with Sean McMahon and we both referenced Davy Fitzgerald, and the goal he shipped in the first half of the 1995 final against Offaly.
Fitzy didn’t let it affect him in the second half and neither did Callanan yesterday. He didn’t get much to do but he made one smart save, while he nailed most of his puckouts.
He was off cue with a couple but he held his composure, while his body language was always strong and positive. And, crucially, he or Galway didn’t concede any more goals.
That is the maturity that is in this Galway team now. The questions were asked of Callanan and a lot more players but they found the answers to anything Waterford threw at them.
When Waterford put Austin Gleeson on Gearoid McInerney, Waterford clearly had a plan to go after the big Oranmore man, to run him and get him on the back foot.
G-Mac never flinched. It reminded me of the great phrase Kilkenny and Kerry often use — hammer the hammer. I think you have to give Micheál Donoghue great credit. He gave McInerney the licence to follow Gleeson up the field when he went wandering. Galway knew that they had enough cover in behind with Aidan Harte, but they trusted in their system to get the job done.
Harte didn’t have a great start. He went up for a couple of high balls which led to key Waterford scores, including the first goal. It may have been down to a lack of communication as much as anything else but, even though he may not have been affecting the game as much as he and Galway would have liked, Harte didn’t let it affect him.
Finally getting over the line isn’t always straightforward. As well as the two sloppy goals, Galway gave away two silly frees, one for Adrian Tuohey catching the ball three times when he was in a good position coming out of defence, the other coming from John Hanbury picking the ball off the ground.
You have to give massive credit to Moran for the way he engineered and finished his goal but if you take all those scores into consideration, that is eight points that Galway had to chase when they probably felt there would have been no need had they been a little bit more composed. And yet Galway still won the game by three points, which underlines the quality and resilience in this team.
It was a great first half, loaded with incidents, but I’m sure Derek McGrath was delighted with the way the half went for Waterford. I could nearly picture Derek and what he was saying to his players. “It is our day. We haven’t even started to hurl yet and we are only one point behind. Everything is going the way we want it to go.”
Galway would be disappointed too with certain elements of their play in the third quarter. They allowed Waterford take control but Galway still hurled with tremendous patience, which has been a feature of their game all year.
Wexford and Tipperary came at them with a blitz on both days and Galway withstood the onslaught and drove right through it. There was never any panic in their game. The wide Moran registered at the end of the third quarter was massive because Galway came down and got the next two points, to go two ahead.
There were some fascinating battles. Waterford went after John Hanbury with ‘Brick’ Walsh but I felt that Hanbury handled that challenge manfully. After the first 10 minutes, Hanbury was on top. Then Brick finally started to assert himself but it took an awful lot out of him.
Galway got most of the rest of their matchups right, while they always had the extra bit of class, that extra polish to put a shine to the performance. They didn’t really need to threaten the D or go hunting for goals. If someone had said to you at the start of the year that Galway would score two goals against Dublin, and that they wouldn’t score a goal again for the rest of the championship, you wouldn’t have been backing them to win the All-Ireland.
You probably would have told that person to go away and get some sleep. You would have thought that it wasn’t possible, especially for a team with serious All-Ireland ambitions, but that’s a sign of a team that knows about themselves, that is very comfortable in its own skin.
It reminded me a little of ourselves in 1997. The pressure was on. We conceded two second-half goals, but we still got the job done. That is a sign of a team that knows each other, that has each other’s backs.
Conor Whelan was very well marked by Noel Connors but straight after the second goal, he got a flick up along the line, and got one chance to get away from Connors, and nailed a brilliant point. Galway had their noses in front, and I’m sure Micheál was able to say to the lads at half-time, “We have made mistakes, we have been a little jittery, but we are after winning the first half by one point. If we win the second half by another point, that will do us, we will be All-Ireland champions, we don’t care what way it is done, as long as we get it done.”
There has been a lot of emotion involved for Galway over the last few weeks with the passing of the great Tony Keady, but Galway handled that emotion well yesterday. There were only six frees in the first half, and Waterford nailed five of them. That could have thrown Galway off course too but it didn’t.
The second half wasn’t as high quality as the first but I thought that was more down to fatigue because of the way they both went at it in the first half, especially with the amount of hits and tackling. Galway’s bench, though, was massive. Jason Flynn and Niall Burke nailed some brilliant scores, especially when Galway needed them. Niall may have felt a little wronged with Johnny Glynn starting ahead of him but he just put the head down and channelled that frustration in the ideal manner. That was another sign of how united this team is.
Waterford have been heroic all year. They will be disappointed not to have got the job done but you cannot really complain when you get two goals, the opposition doesn’t get any, and you still lose by three points. They could have snatched a draw but there was no sense of injustice when they didn’t.
Galway just had too many shooters. They hit massive points tallies every day they went out. They did the same again yesterday, with a score of 0-26. They didn’t even force Stephen O’Keeffe into making a save but Galway trusted their system.
Galway’s on-field management was just slightly better too. You can argue the toss that if Galway had lost, the Johnny Glynn move would have been deemed to be a mistake, that Aidan Harte didn’t play as well as Tadgh de Búrca. But as JFK said, “Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan.”
It doesn’t matter how you get the job done, as long as you get it done. And Galway finally got it done.
