Colin Sheridan: Losing the numbers game but winning what matters

Not everything that happens on a football pitch can be measured. 

Galway’s Damien Comer celebrates after last week's thrilling win. Pic: INPHO/James Crombie

There are three kinds of lies, so the adage goes: lies, damn lies, and statistics. Last Sunday in Salthill, Mayo dominated Galway by just about every metric conceivable. Possession. Scoring chances. Turnovers. Mindless solo runs. Soundbites. A fella on the terrace even told me that one of the Mayo players had squatpressed or leg thrust or shot-put 460 kilos last week. He said this moments before the same player soloed through the Galway defence, only to turn back, like a toddler who suddenly realised they had strayed too far from their parents. Yet, for all their dominance, at the final whistle it was not them, but Galway, that were Connacht champions. The reasons for this reversal had very little to do with squat pressing or metres ran. It had everything to do with wanting to play football.

I could well be wrong, but the information gathered from Damien Comer’s GPS unit may be the least impressive of his contemporaries. The Annaghdown man gave a man-of-the-match performance, but, watching him from the bleachers, you could never say “he was everywhere” or “he covered every blade of grass.” Far from it. His impact on the game was seismic, but sporadic. Whether by accident or design, he spent a lot of the game far away from the action, often on his hunkers, likely taking a breath and surveying the patterns of play in front of him. It was like watching one of those nature videos where a cheetah waits and waits and waits, only to suddenly spring to life, causing absolute chaos amongst the herd of gazelle he’s after infiltrating. Comer played like a man possessed last Sunday, and, crucially, was given as much space as he needed by his teammates to wreak as much havoc as he possibly could. Something good came from everything he touched, a rare feat for a modern intercounty footballer especially in the metric-obsessed dynamic that seems to dominate how the game is placed. Comer went for less is more. It’s just that his ‘more’ was massive.