Watching brief left Colm Galvin gunning for action

“First In, Last Out” is the slogan that adorns the walls of Clare GAA’s Caherlohan training base outside Tulla.

Truth be told, that didn’t apply to Colm Galvin last year. This very date 12 months ago, he was heading over to Boston to play with the Tipperary club after lining out for Clare throughout the league. Two months later and he was back in time to play a bit-part role in the qualifier win over Offaly but had missed out on the crucial Munster semi-final defeat to Limerick.

Pangs of regret hit him as he watched that game in a friend’s house in Boston that May 24 morning. Not that he felt as if he had let his team-mates down. “Me leaving was making room for another fella to step up. Nowadays it’s not a 15-man panel, it’s a 31 or 32-man panel and it’s up to another lad to grab that position and make it his own.”

Still, he reckoned he could have made a difference.

“Around 65 minutes in, I was excited for the lads. I was very, very happy for the lads. Then the last five (minutes), the last two, whatever it was, I had my head in my hands. I felt I could have brought something to it, even if it was a point, or even a pass, if there was a pull, that they might have got over the line with something like that.

“So, it was very hard to watch it but look we got a second bite of the cherry against Cork and we didn’t take it.”

It was there and then the desire in him to return home grew. Davy Fitzgerald had left the door open from the time Galvin broke the news to him midway through the league he wanted to sample a different lifestyle for a while.

“It was tough enough, alright, to tell the management team more so than make the flight arrangements! It was tough for about two hours before training but after that Davy... look, to be fair to him, I can’t say a bad word, he took it fairly well. He was very good about it, he didn’t have any negativity towards me, he was very positive.

“He said, ‘Look, if you want to come back in there would be no problem’ and that was a brilliant thing for him to have said. It made me go away with ease. It didn’t make me not want to go back. So that’s probably more of a reason why I came back as well.

“To be honest, I just wanted to go away and see a bit of the world. Because when you’re playing at this level, you might see us training and playing matches in February but we’ve four months’ work done at that stage. Whether you’re with the team or on your own, you’re still training because at this level if you leave yourself go between September and Christmas and try to catch up in February then it’s not going to happen. You have to keep yourself in line year-in, year-out.

“I’m only 23 now and this is my sixth year on the panel, so it’s a lot of mileage on the clock but at the same time we’re in a good place with Clare at the moment.”

During his exile, Fitzgerald didn’t so much keep in contact with Galvin as his father. “My father let me know he wanted me home and I wanted to come home myself after the Limerick game because it was very hard for me to sit over there and watch the way they lost that game. I really wanted to get back to it at that stage.”

If Galvin had told Fitzgerald he was upping sticks in his debut season in charge back in 2012, the reaction may have been different. “I suppose in the first year Davy took over we were sort of going, ‘This lad is mad!’. But then the last year or two... you only see the side of Davy at the side of the field whereas Davy off the field is a very different character. Very calm, very mellow, very easy to talk to.

“You see him when he’s animated – it’s pure and utter passion. I’d say he has the biggest passion for the game that I’ve come across, and he brings that out in the players.

“Even after five years you wouldn’t be really sick of listening to him because he brings such passion to the table.” ·

* Colm Galvin and Austin Gleeson were speaking at an Allianz Hurling Division 1 final preview event