Sleepless nights and driving doubts all in rearview on Joyce's road to redemption 

I have had a few rough nights at it, and I had a lot of soul-searching," says Galway manager ahead of return to an All-Ireland decider for the first time since 2001 

A long way in a short time: Galway senior football manager Pádraic Joyce at his team's press evening last week ahead of Sunday's All-Ireland senior football final against Kerry in Croke Park. Pic: INPHO/Bryan Keane

John Kiely recently admitted to regularly pacing his back garden during a difficult first year in charge of Limerick.

The county didn’t win a single championship game the summer of 2017, with Kiely spending many an evening doing laps of the backyard while questioning if he was the right man for the job.

The self-doubt whooshing around Pádraic Joyce during a difficult first two years in charge of Galway did not lend itself to any pacing away from public eyes. There were no laps done of the front or back garden.

It was instead during the stillness of the night when he lay awake asking himself if he had the capacity to do the job he had been entrusted with.

After a near perfect start to his tenure, which included four victories in their first five Division 1 outings pre-Covid, Galway’s graph dipped beyond all comprehension when the action resumed seven and a half months later.

A 15-point tanking at home to Mayo and defeat to Dublin, again on home soil, both soured and undid the earlier body of league work, with the county’s year petering out with another home defeat to Mayo in the Connacht final.

2021 brought no improvement, only further slippage.

Relegation from Division 1 was followed by a Connacht final second-half no-show, during which the county went scoreless for 26 minutes and didn’t kick a single point from play. It all conspired to leave sizeable question marks hanging over Joyce’s position last summer and autumn. Even the man himself was asking questions.

“I have had a lot of moments. Definitely the last two years were tough enough when the match was over,” the Galway manager begins. “I have had a few rough nights at it, and I had a lot of soul-searching last July as a group, as players, and as management. There is no one hiding from that.” 

Contributing to those rough nights was the 22–point League hammering last May by this weekend’s opponents. If the subsequent Connacht final collapse was inexplicable, the 4-21 to 0-11 Kerry rout was downright embarrassing.

“You would be doubting yourself, doubting the way you set-up and why did you do it that way,” Joyce says of his thought process on the long drive home from Austin Stack Park. “It is great when you win a game as a manager, you are a tactical genius, and when you lose it, you haven’t a clue.

“That is just the way things are said nowadays, but you have to look at everything, you have to look at the players you have and see were they the boys for the fight? Were they the boys for the job? And some were and some weren’t.

“We went away [from the 2021 season], came back, talked about it, and got a different formula put together and so far it has been working, it has been great.” 

Said formula includes much greater protection of the D than was previously the case. Theirs is an improved defensive shape and solidity that has emanated from the decision during the off-season to enlist the services of former Kerry coach Cian O’Neill.

“Yeah, it is,” replies Joyce when asked if the phone call to the former Kildare manager was the most important he has made during his three seasons at the helm. “It is up there along with the conversation with Jonathan Harris-Wright (head of S&C) and Bernard Dunne (performance coach). The three of them have come in this year and done really good.

“Are Cian and I bosom buddies? Probably not. We get on well together, I respect his decisions. We have had loads of rows, don’t get me wrong.

“That is part and parcel of it. That is why we got him in; to get the little bit of experience we were lacking as a group and that I was lacking probably, but he has been exceptional for us, as have Jonathan and Bernard.

“We needed a performance type coach person and Bernard has just brought that little bit of mental toughness to the lads that we were lacking, just how to cope in tight and pressure situations.” 

Joyce’s willingness to reach out for help and embrace the different elements of the game he never really saw need for during his own playing days displays an awareness and adaptability that cannot be overlooked in the turnaround in Galway’s fortunes this year.

“I used always say if I wanted someone to motivate me, I am in trouble,” he says. 
Tough love, rather than any arm placed gently around the shoulder, was the approach of his time. But given the game and society’s evolution, is the old authoritarian style counter-productive in a modern-day dressing-room?

“A few can take it. A few get it. They don’t react too well to it, but they’d have a chat with you after training about it, and that’s fine," says Joyce. “I am who I am; I’m not going to change. I’ll change a little bit, as much as I can, but you have to be mindful as well that you talk to them in a constructive manner.” 

The back-and-forth conversation between Joyce’s days in maroon and his current posting on the sideline offers further reminder of the extent of time passed since the county was among the last two standing in the championship.

When the Killererin full-forward kicked 10 points in the 2001 final to secure the county’s second All-Ireland in three years, nobody - absolutely nobody - would have countenanced another 22 years rolling by before Galway returned to the concluding day of action.

“I was 24 at the time and I remember having a few pints with John Divilly that week, I was saying to him, we’ll win another one or two and retire then at 26 or 27. But it didn’t go that way," he reflects.

“I was playing another 11 years after that and didn’t even see Croke Park, never mind the colour of an All-Ireland medal. It’s not that we were playing bad football, it’s just that we weren’t good enough as a group. We weren’t doing enough as a county to make sure we got there.

“It’s a long time since we’ve been there. A county our size shouldn’t be away that long. Again, it’s not for me to fix but we are going some way towards half sorting it and we’ll see where it goes in the future. But definitely for me Galway should be getting to an All-Ireland semi-final stage every three or four years at least anyway.” 

The first of those two Galway wins under John O’Mahony was immortalised by the superb ‘A Year ‘til Sunday’ documentary. The filmmaker Pat Comer, Joyce reveals, has been in and around the camp this year helping out.

Has he enough material for a second doc? “I’d say he has!” 

All that’s left so is for Joyce’s cast to provide a similarly glorious closing scene.