James Skehill: Galway minors suffered from lack of competition in previous years
PROMISING: Galway's Aaron Niland celebrates against Cork. Pic: INPHO/Eamonn McGee
James Skehill and Joe Canning, both selectors with the Galway minors, got chatting at training during the week about their own minor days.
They were trying to figure out how many of their colleagues from their mid-2000s teams went on to become established senior players for Galway.
"I think from the 2006 team you had Joe, Aidan Harte, David Burke and myself," said Skehill, an Electric Ireland All-Ireland Minor winner in 2005 and a finalist in 2006. "So four of us between the 2005 and 2006 teams that I played on, who lasted 10 years on a senior team.
"Everybody else who came in as seniors was for two, three years and they were gone. That just wasn't enough of a return for the quality of players we had at that stage."
It begs a couple of questions. Firstly, how many players does he think will make it from the current team that will face Clare in this weekend's Electric Ireland All-Ireland Minor final?
"I look at our group at the minute and I'd be disappointed, borderline devastated, if we didn't get six if not seven regular senior players through from it," said the Cappataggle man, an All-Ireland senior medallist in 2017.
"And when I say regular I'm talking about playing for a decade. We want guys to stay the course, to get into a senior squad and to form part of that squad for eight, nine, 10 years."
The second question, the broader issue of why Galway have won 13 Electric Ireland All-Ireland Minor titles over the last 30 years or so, but just one senior All-Ireland, is a more difficult one to answer.
One school of thought is that entering the underage championships later than the Munster and Leinster teams, meaning they typically played fewer games, impacted the development of Galway players.
This is the first year that Galway have participated in the Electric Ireland Leinster Minor Hurling championship and Skehill says the benefits are already clear.
"In my two years of minor, in 2005 and 2006, the total amount of games we played in those two years was six," he said. "The guys this year have already played six games and this will be their seventh. In terms of exposure, experience, even that extra familiarity they all have with each other and with the management, it's been huge.
"I won't say it's the reason we didn't have successful senior teams on the back of previous All-Ireland winning minor teams but this can only be a positive step for our lads.
"And in fairness, we have to be selfish in this, and I use that word selfish softly, because we're the victim of geography. We're based in the west where there's no competition and we have to play somewhere. I think getting into a provincial championship was the only way forward and I think we've added to it."
Galway approach this weekend's final as favourites. They've won each of their six games by double-digit margins, averaging out at a 16.6 winning margin per game and adding up to a neat 100 points to spare overall.
Clare, meanwhile, lost to Limerick at the group stage in Munster before exacting revenge in the provincial semi-final. Brian O'Connell's side then overcame Cork in the Electric Ireland Munster final and Kilkenny in the All-Ireland series.
"The quality of the opposition we're going to face, it will be the best we have faced so far," said Skehill. "I think we've got progressively better as the Leinster championship and the All-Ireland series has gone on but Clare is definitely going to be our biggest test. We're drumming it into the lads that this is going to be a ferocious battle and that if we're not ready, we'll go home with nothing."
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