POST-MATCH TALK:Anthony Cunningham has the polite bearing of a man who has probably never banged a table in his life. Somehow, it doesn't feel like it would be his style. His response yesterday when it was put to him that all these high-scoring games will give his team a name for being overly cavalier was to let out an almost girlish chuckle.
“No, no,” he laughed. “We wouldn’t be approaching the game like that. As long as we’re scoring we’re happy – we’re not going to stop that, obviously.”
It was an odd game for the Galway manager to get his head around. Any day you watch your side rack up 5-23 ought to be a good day, yet Cunningham knew well they owed a serious chunk of their total to a rickety afternoon in the Offaly defence. They can’t hope to see any such largesse in the Leinster final.
“We got a good start,” he said. “There probably wasn’t much in it apart from the goals in the first half. We would be happy with the performance.
“We finished well, we got a good spread of scores. We have improvement to find, there’s no doubt about it. But we’ve come through it well.
“We let in three goals. Shane Dooley is some marksman from frees but we’d be disappointed with that. James Skehill is coming back from injury and he’ll definitely benefit from the game, as will a lot of others. But that’s the way the game has gone too – there’s a lot of goals in the matches.
“Kevin Hynes had a fine game today, Fergal Moore had a fine game. Iarla Tannian did very well in midfield. The last day we were 17 or 18 points ahead and let in some late goals. But I was very happy with Kevin’s performance out there today. We’ll be tested the next day, but I think we have the guns to keep the goals out as well.”
For Ollie Baker, it was a day when hope always seemed only just beyond his side’s reach. Having the better of the play for spells in the first half didn’t amount to enough to counter that effect of the early goals. And even when they ate up some of the ground between them and Galway in the run-up to half-time, Damien Hayes’s goal finished them off.
“I thought just when we got it back to four points that we missed a couple of chances and we kind of had a bit of a run at the time,” said Baker.
“If we had got within three points, it’s a psychological barrier, and if we had got within three points at half-time it would have taken an awful lot of their artillery.
“But we had a couple of bad wides just before half-time and they went down and got a goal. It pushed out their lead again and they always had a cushion in the second half unless we got an awful deluge of goals. So unfortunately we’ll have to go down the other path.”
Malachy Clerkin
