O'Mahony keeps cards close to chest on Galway future

JOHN O'MAHONY was giving nothing away about his future with Galway footballers following yesterday's defeat, pointing out that there was a Connacht U-21 final to be played in 10 days' time and that they'd have to stay around for that.

However, team captain Pádraig Joyce, who wasn’t happy with the team tactics, hinted that O’Mahony might need to “to look at his situation.”

“John owes no one any favours. He has done all he can with Galway. He brought them out of the doldrums to where they are now. If someone told you in 1997 that Galway would win two All-Irelands by 2001, they’d think you were on drugs,” Joyce said.

“In fairness, he has to look at his own situation as well. Everyone has to look at their own situation - players, county board and team management and assess what went wrong and assess their involvement in it. Maybe some of us are around too long or whatever, we don’t know. But, we’ll wait and see.”

At a general level, Joyce agreed that the team never quite reproduced the magic of 2001 over the course of the campaign. Questioning their approach, he said: “on the way it went, we should have stuck with the system that probably won it last year, with a roaming corner-forward. No disrespect to what happened, but looking back on it, that probably would have worked to our advantage.

“Apart from that we were carrying injuries all year and Ja (Fallon) and Mikey (Donnellan) were taken off. We were unfortunate, but it just was not our day.” O’Mahony said that if there was any team outside of Connacht that he would like to see winning the All-Ireland it was Kerry. “You had difficult circumstances earlier on but you bounced back. You are through and through sportsmen and always have been,” he told the players in their dressing room.

Interviewed afterwards, he accepted the significance of Kerry’s victory was that they had been able to fine-tune their team, through the benefit of the qualifier system - just as Galway had managed last year. “I said during the week that we wouldn’t use the system as an excuse if we lost and I am not going to now. In hindsight, it might be when we sit down to analyse. It does create difficulties, but we were beaten comprehensively out there. There are a lot of out lads who didn’t do themselves justice out there, but they have been great ambassadors in the last few years. They’re not written off yet.

“It is becoming increasingly hard to defend an All-Ireland with the demands of what it means to any county and when you add in the back door where teams can get a head of steam up again. Obviously that will be looked on a bit more as the years go on and tinkered with a bit more. We’re just putting our hands up and saying we just weren’t good enough.”

Happy with the start they got, O’Mahony said he wasn’t ‘that worried’ at half time. But, clearly he was afterwards. “We just couldn’t pick it up and they got the scores and the second goal killed us off. There was just no bite left in us in that last ten or fifteen minutes.

“I always said that if we went on to do well this year people would say that we played within ourselves and peaked at the right time. When you look back at it after today’s performance it would be legitimate to say that the warning signals were there during periods of games.”

For his part Joyce agred that Kerry were more up for it and played some beautiful football. “They had three goal chances and scored two whereas we had five chances and scored one. That was the difference. Séamus Moynihan epitomised the spirit of their team.

“They were all up for the game. They seemed to have an extra man all the time out around the middle of the field and they were able to pop good ball into Colm Cooper and Mike Frank who did the business big time.”