Going for the elusive double

Tomorrow afternoon, Galway's footballers take the field at Croke Park with the county three matches away from an historic double. Neither John O'Mahony's team nor Noel Lane's hurlers will be particularly happy with this added dimension to the routine pressures of the All- Ireland series, but it's there.

Galway have rarely been this close to the elusive double, achieved only four times in the history of the GAA - twice by Cork in 1890 and 1990 and twice by Tipperary in 1895 and 1900.

It's surprising that Galway, a county with almost automatic access to the All-Ireland stages of the hurling championship, should have had such difficulty in even reaching both the hurling and football final. It remains a fact that the county has yet to win two All-Ireland semi-finals in the same year.

There was probably no better chance than 43 years ago. Unlike in 1986 and '87 when the hurlers won their semi-finals against Kilkenny and Tipperary respectively but lost to Tyrone and Cork, after a replay, in the football, Galway's hurlers in 1958 received a bye to the All-Ireland final to play, then as now, Tipperary.

This was because of a short-lived rotation of the semi-final pairings so that Galway, the perennial Connacht representatives, could be on the same side of the draw as Ulster champions every three years. Even that undemanding task was withdrawn in the mid-1950s.

Antrim stepped down from the senior championship after a 44-point defeat, 12-17 to 2-3, by Wexford, for whom Nicky Rackard scored 7-7.

With no Ulster team in the championship, Galway got two free runs to the final, one in 1955 and again in '58. By this stage it was over 30 years since the county had won an All-Ireland but the 1950s wasn't a bad decade for Galway. In 1951 they won a National League and two years later defeated Kilkenny to reach an All-Ireland final in which it took a late goal to seal Cork's victory, 3-3 to 0-8.

In both 1955 and '58, Galway were unlucky to run into teams on the verge of greatness, Wexford and Tipperary who would share eight of the All-Irelands between 1955-65.

At the same time, Galway's footballers were agonisingly close to success. They had won an All- Ireland in 1956 and would add a three-in-a-row between 1964-66.

Mattie McDonagh, the only player to feature on all four teams, felt that the 1956 team had won an All-Ireland almost too easily, compared with the 1960s team that lost one before winning three.

"People said to me about the 1963 final (lost narrowly to Dublin) 'if only we'd won that, it would have been four-in-a-row'. My response was always that if we'd beaten Dublin we probably wouldn't even have had two-in- a-row."

Jack Mahon, Gaelic games historian and centre back in 1956, says that both of the teams in 1958 were caught between two stools.

"In the early 1950s, hurling was even bigger than football in the county but that had changed by '58. I'd say the footballers should have won more than the one All-Ireland in '56 and we stayed up pretty well at that time, winning five Connacht championships in a row, a record.

But we just lost semi-finals by a point and gave a poor display in the 1959 final against Kerry.

"We threw away the 1958 semi-final against Dublin. With less than 10 minutes left, we led by five points but John Joyce got two goals.

"Even then we got back to level but at the very end Kevin Heffernan got a free that was a wee bit doubtful, a 14-yard free for the last kick of the match.

"John Kennedy who marked Heffernan that day met him last year on a trip home from Australia. The first words he said to him were, 'You never deserved that free'."

Similar questions of worthiness surrounded the hurlers' appearance in the All-Ireland final. The semi-final between Kilkenny and Tipperary had been widely seen as the real final and attracted a bigger attendance than the official final.

Low expectations affected the crowd of 47,000 and there hasn't been a poorer turn-out for an All-Ireland final in 57 years.

"They had got straight into the final without playing a game and many people felt they hadn't earned the right to be there," according to Jack Mahon. That was the way they played in the first half before contributing to a competitive second period.

"In the second half, it was blow for blow, ball for ball and score for score. Unfortunately, we had conceded four goals before half- time," was one rueful Galway perspective.

This year differs from 1958 and the mid-1980s in that in the first instance the hurlers were not regarded as serious contenders and 30 years on, the footballers were similarly unrated.

Next month, Galway's hurlers will probably be slight favourites after the impressive defeat of Kilkenny. The footballers have been regarded as contenders since before the championship began.

Levels of public interest are also unrecognisable compared to the 1950s. "The double is an angle on this year's championship and the media explore all angles to the limit. In the '50s, people talked about matches in the pubs but there weren't flags until the day.

"You travelled in cars. Last year after beating Kildare in the All-Ireland semi-final the (Galway) team bus went down O'Connell Street on the way to the station, led a Garda escort. The crowds were nearly coming through the window."

There'll be presumably no nearly about it if the team makes history tomorrow evening.