Galvin raises the bar for Limerick football

LIMERICK travel — not in hope but in expectation — to Cusack Park in Ennis tomorrow for a Munster SFC semi-final appointment with John Kennedy’s Clare.

Victory over champions Cork has created an ever-developing wave of support and fame for Liam Kearns' project along the Shannon. Characters like Diarmuid Sheehy, John Quane and Muiris Gavin are enjoying the kind of adulation usually reserved for their hurling colleagues.

Standing above them all however, literally and physically, is young midfielder John Galvin. At 6'5", and blessed with superb athleticism, Galvin is a lord of the soaring catch, the prime source of possession for many Limerick attacks, and more than anyone else is the new face of football in the county.

Galvin is from Croom, hardly a traditional football powerbase, and he did dip his feet in a few other codes before settling on football.

"I played a bit of hurling when I was young, at U-12 or thereabouts, but that was only because I was twice the size of everyone else," he admits.

"I was never much good at it, the others started growing and it didn't work anymore."

A brief rugby career followed soon after. "At 6'1" in first year in Ard Scoil Ris, I could walk through with about four of those fellas hanging off me, but they grew too, learned how to bring me down, so I decided to hell with this. I played at number 8 and just took the ball out of the scrum and took off."

Finally, he took up a sport that was even more alien to Croom: basketball. Here again, inevitably, size was a factor. Under National League coach Tommy Hehir, he developed rapidly, winning an All-Ireland title with the school, representing Ireland at U-18 level and seeing a bit of the world. Well, Germany and Andorra at least.

But football was always tugging hard. "My father is from Finuge, just outside Listowel, and he played football with them. He moved here 26 years ago, when he was about thirty," Galvin says. "A loss, they couldn't afford to lose anyone in Finuge, only a couple of hundred people there."

But his dabbling in other sports wasn't wasted, and John credits basketball in particular for his rapid progress in gaelic football.

"It was when I started playing basketball that I started getting good at football. It was great for improving your ball-handling skills, good for your peripheral vision as well, because in basketball you have to be aware of everything going on around you, in a very confined space. There's a lot of physical contact as well, especially at senior National League. I was marking Americans there, giants, 6'8", 6'9", nearly as wide as they were tall, just out of college in the States, where all they'd done for the previous four or five years was weights," he explains.

Robbed of a chance of a Munster senior champions double, the onus now rests firmly with Galvin and colleagues. But first they must get over a potential banana-skin this Sunday: unfancied Clare, the tag worn so often by Limerick, in Cusack Park.

"Clare are going to be tough, they will be out to take us, big-time. And feck it, they're a bit of a bogey team for us as well, we never seem to play well against them. We've lost twice to them this year, played them four times in the last couple of years, they've beaten us three times. They come out against us very fired up, feel they can beat us, and they'll have that belief next day as well. However, if we play to our full potential, we should win."

Indeed they should and that's conceded even in Clare. "We're facing a huge task," admits manager John Kennedy, ironically an old friend of Limerick's Kerry-born coach, Liam Kearns. "The fact that we're at home should be an advantage, but even that's gone now, with the huge numbers coming up from Limerick."

"Limerick should fear us, because this is a tricky assignment for them. You can build it up for one day, then it can all go wrong. It's difficult to maintain that level all the time."