Remember when the Galway hurlers were managed by a Limerick man?
Galway manager Shane O'Neill watches Brian Concannon of Galway in action against Gearoid Hegarty and Graeme Mulcahy of Limerick in 2020 at Croke Park. Picture: Daire Brennan/Sportsfile
It’s one of those forgotten episodes now but not much more than a year after their All-Ireland title was wrestled away from them in August 2018, Galway hurling turned in an unlikely direction when looking for a manager to succeed Micheál Donoghue: Limerick, the same county that had usurped them from their throne.
Shane O’Neill had not been part of John Kiely’s management that had made the county’s breakthrough but was supremo of their leading club team in the seasons running up to it. In his four years over his native Na Piarsaigh, he had guided them to three county finals, two Munster titles and two All-Ireland final appearances (three if you include a replay); in March 2018 it took an exceptional Cuala team to deny the Caherdavin club backing up their All-Ireland title of 2016 with another.
That Galway head-hunted O’Neill was a measure of Limerick’s newfound status in the sport. For a decade or more prior to Kiely’s appointment, Limerick had been the great importers: Padjoe, Justin, John Allen, Donal O’Grady. Now they were in the business of exporting, and not just to developing counties like Offaly and Kildare where Leo O’Connor and Joe Quaid had been enlisted to help them move up the tiers.
Galway were perennial All-Ireland contenders, recent All-Ireland champions and largely self-reliant: ever since Babs gave Cyril Farrell a hand in the fledgling years of his inter-county managerial career, the only time Galway had gone for an outside coach had been the ill-fated Ger Loughnane experiment of 2007-2008.
More so, he was inheriting a dressing room full of recent All-Ireland winners who had seen the man most responsible for their success walk out the door. Not just anyone could fill those shoes, something hurling committee chairman (and soon-to-be county board chair) Paul Bellew, who had family connections with Na Piarsaigh, appreciated.
Joe Canning was part of a players’ delegation who met O’Neill, a solicitor by trade, days before the board ratified his appointment and those first impressions were favourable. “One thing that struck me instantly was how similar a personality he was to the man he was replacing,” Canning wrote in his 2024 book. “Just like Micheál, he’s a quiet, understated character. We were impressed.”
Another plus was that O’Neill had been able to retain the services of Donoghue’s highly-respected and popular S&C coach, Lukasz Kirszenstein. But other things were not in his favour. For one, he was less appointed in the off-season as some teams’ pre-season; it had taken until November for him to be identified and then ratified.
Then just four games into the league, Covid hit. In all of senior inter-county hurling and football, O’Neill and Davy Burke, then with Wicklow, were the only managers whose two sole seasons in charge coincided with the Covid-disrupted campaigns of 2020 and 2021.
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“Imagine trying to get know the players in your care when suddenly denied the regular access of physically meeting them?” Canning noted in his book. “I can only imagine how difficult that season must have been, trying to keep the energy right with players they barely knew through zoom sessions.”
Despite that constraint, O’Neill’s team upon the resumption of collective training and playing would beat both the reigning Leinster champions (Wexford) and All-Ireland champions (Tipperary) either side of a provincial final defeat to Kilkenny that swung on TJ Reid and Richie Hogan goaling within 60 seconds of each other.
With Galway so a point up in added time, goalkeeper Éanna Murphy deliberately drove his puck-out deep into the stand and out for a sideline, allowing Galway to reset behind the ball and mark every man. Ronan Maher duly drove the subsequent ball long, Gearóid McInerney won it, and seconds later Galway had secured a free they’d point for a two-point win.
In the subsequent All-Ireland semi-final then in an empty Croke Park, Galway were level with O’Neill’s native Limerick going into injury time. They’d eventually lose by three points, the closest anyone would get to Limerick that year or the year after.
That though was little consolation to O’Neill by the end of his tenure. In 2021, despite sharing a league title with Kilkenny, they’d lose both their championship games. Canning in his book believes the management made a mistake of underestimating and overlooking Dublin in the lead-up to the campaign’s opening game: “The message from the top was that essentially we had bigger fish to fry”.
And as well as feeling he and David Burke were prematurely pushed to the periphery on and off the field, Canning thought O’Neill was almost too data-driven, picking a team of athletes more than hurlers against Waterford to try to keep up with speedsters like Jamie Barron.
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That said, that off-season the players informed O’Neill they wished for him to stay on, just to make a key change or two to his backroom. O’Neill though decided it was time to finish up, paving the way for Henry Shefflin whose own tenure would cast O’Neill’s in a kinder light.
Within two years, O’Neill was back with Na Piarsaigh, leading them to another county title, sealed by Shane Dowling deliberately driving a puck-out over the sideline in the Gaelic Grounds just as Éanna Murphy had back in 2020. And tellingly, Na Piarsaigh’s S&C lead was Kirszenstein, a measure of the loyalty and respect O’Neill and his coach John Fitzgerald commanded.
If this or some season soon proves to be John Kiely’s last dance, Diarmuid Mullins is the most likely successor, this year’s All-Ireland minor title success cementing a reputation upon how he developed the likes of Shane O’Brien, Aidan O’Connor and Adam English at U20.
O’Neill though would also be a worthy candidate.
As well as serially reaching and winning county titles, he knows what it’s like to fill big shoes. And is the wiser for it
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