Fahy looks to Kingdom to crown his queens of football

PJ FAHY has two hopes. Firstly he is anticipating Sunday’s TG4 All-Ireland Ladies senior football final against Dublin, hoping his team can emulate Kerry’s achievement last weekend, and function as effectively as a team unit.

And if circumstances differed, he would be as happy watching his brother Gerry - who recently resigned as Offaly boss - in his place.

“My brother is the one who has done all that in team management - and I was just watching him. I’d love him to be here and not me. He would love to be involved in an All-Ireland final. He’s a fantastic manager.”

Fahy brings his business acumen to the Galway set-up. His background in management helped him to build a saw-milling business 15 years ago.

“You get a good team around you and delegate responsibility. It makes the job easy,” he explains.

Two years ago, on his appointment as senior manager, he set about finding the right person to train the team. He found Richard Bowles, the former Limerick goalkeeper, and he in turn picked Mick O’Connell, the pair having worked with the Galway minors five years ago.

“Training is enjoyable,” admits Fahy.

“Everything is done with the ball. We started in November with two nights a week, then three nights in the middle of the year and, from the first of June, every second night. We have had almost 120 training sessions, so a monumental effort has been put in.”

Fahy ensures the girls are looked after properly because of the sacrifices they make. If that were not possible he says, he wouldn’t be involved.

“We have girls away in college, coming from Dublin, Limerick, Sligo. One of the girls is teaching in Wexford and she has travelled up and down all year. We’re dealing with intelligent people and they are easy to deal with. If you look at the CVs, you have vets, doctors, teachers, trainee gardaí, accountants, nurses and a physio.”

Under the round robin system, Galway met specialists Mayo twice in Connacht, beating them both times. The teams played a thrilling draw in the recent All-Ireland semi-final in Portlaoise. Six days later in the replay, Galway won by a point.

“The Tuesday after the game, we had a team meeting. That refocused the players and gave them confidence going into the replay. We looked at the errors and knew if we could correct them, we’d have a good chance.

“We beat them the first time by a point and the second day by 14 points. It still put pressure on our girls to win a third time. You might beat a team twice, but it’s hard to do it three times. And when you play Mayo it’s more than a game. There’s that neighbourly thing - the upcoming team against a team that was, maybe, on the way down!”

Galway have played Dublin twice already this year, and the management have studied videos of those games.

However, Fahy has mixed views on video-analysis. “I don’t think videos ever do justice to a match. You don’t get all the angles, you don’t see what goes on up and down the field.”

And then he draws on moments from Kerry’s triumph last Sunday.

“Hopefully we’ll do a ‘Kerry’ on it. We would look at the way Kerry played, use it as inspiration and ask ourselves, can we do that?”