SIDELINE CUT:"It's been a long time coming but there it is for Galway"

-Michael O’Hehir, September 1980.

THE MAROON hurlers were a curiosity 32 years ago and they remain so today.

On that overcast day in 1980, they weren’t really supposed to win because the GAA, like the country in general, ran along pre-ordained lines and tradition meant everything. So that victory over Limerick had the stamp of audacity and revolution.

Back then, winning captain Joe Connolly’s echoing of the Pope John Paul’s celebrated salute in Ballybrit – “People of Galway, we lof you” felt like a radical departure from the customary winning speeches. Funny, when you watch it now, it offers a powerful illustration of the omnipotence of the Catholic Church in Irish life at that time.

Everyone got the joke.

Galway’s few minutes in front of the Ard Comhairle were anointed as something sacred when Joe McDonagh, in a fit of pride and passion, took the microphone and sang.

It was an unforgettable scene, with Cyril Farrell, pale shirted and slightly wild-eyed with excitement ducking down so the cameraman could get a clear view of McDonagh singing. It was the day of days for the upstarts.

The problem was that after the Galway hurlers won, nobody could figure quite where they fit in the hierarchy of Gaelic Games – including themselves. Maybe, even as McDonagh sang, there was a sense that this day was just a beautiful freak and the Galway hurling men would be kind enough to bugger off back to that strange place which they had occupied for most of the century – not quite bad enough to be fully discounted but nowhere near good enough to be seriously worried about.

They summered in Munster without ever feeling like they belonged there. They were a puzzle: you could hardly keep the game alive in most counties north of Clare. In Galway, you couldn’t kill it. But they had no intentions of being one-season wonders.

Instead, the dam burst. Offaly won the Liam MacCarthy Cup the following year. And throughout the 1980s, the cognoscenti must have felt that Galway hurling was afflicted with notions of upperosity. First Castlegar and then Sarsfields advertised the health of the game within the county.

For the rest of that decade, Galway teams played with jauntiness and verve. Intentionally or not, they cast themselves as the thorn in the side of the establishment. It wasn’t just Gerry McInerney’s white boots or the gold helmet worn by Conor Hayes or the fact that Tony Keady’s white All-Star tuxedo was the most outré piece of evening wear seen on television since Don Johnson stepped out as Sonny Crockett in Miami Vice.

But those small, flamboyant statements were part of it. Galway were different, peculiar and even a bit eccentric. At their best, they were take-no-prisoners cocky. They were carefree.

There is an interview with Ollie Kilkenny in this week’s Tribune which contains the essence of the Galway mindset back then: “Like, in our time, it wasn’t unusual for a couple of our players to nip into the pub next door from the Ashling hotel and drink two glasses of Guinness the night before the All-Ireland final. Then next morning, the preparation time that was, you would have a priest say mass in the hotel, go to the Phoenix Park for a puck-around and then you hit Croke Park and you tore into them. That is exactly what it was. Different times!”

It all came undone as that deeply bitter row erupted in the spring of 1989 when Galway were still in their pomp: back-to-back All-Ireland champions and looking like good value to make in three-in-a-row.

Nothing captures the state of Ireland at that time like the Keady affair: the Killimordaly man was a centre-back without peers at that time and yet he struggled to find work in his county.

A few months in New York beckoned: work, bucks, fast times and a bit of social hurling. A New York league final playing for Laois against Tipperary . . . word filtering home, complaints made and a hearing which led to a one-year suspension.

A full year! The mind boggles. You only have to watch the Laochra Gael programme featuring Keady to get a sense of the lingering anger about that decision. At the end, he is asked what his gravestone should read and although he laughs, he is quick to say: ‘Tony Keady should have played in ’89’. But he didn’t and Tipperary won and two years later, Keady had finished with county hurling.

It took a few more years before they began to realise in Galway that the good times seemed to have ended with the 1980s and by then, the country at large didn’t give a hoot: hurling was in the midst of a revolution.

Offaly and then Clare and then Wexford and those magical Guinness adverts and Loughnane and Liam Griffin and chastening days for the big three of Kilkenny, Tipp and Cork. It was a hallucinatory time for hurling.

Galway were kind of forgotten about. Except that they kept on producing club teams of splendour and sending shimmering minor hurling teams up to Croke Park as if to reassure the public that the next wave of greatness was on its way.

But then the 1990s passed with just two All-Ireland final appearances (1990 and ’93) and the 2000s flew by with Galway making it to just two Septembers and falling short in both again. Two full decades went by and with them innumerable classy players whose Galway years belong to a mist of “if-only’s” and hard luck days.

How many sensational Galway minors found themselves feted and then too quickly cast aside at senior level? How many promising careers were over before they even began? And what of the men whose fate it was to live in the shadow of that 87/88 bunch?

Names like Rabbitte, Broderick, Hodgins, Burke and Canning (Ollie) will always illuminate a period of time when it seemed more difficult for Galway not to win an All-Ireland than to win one. And the mention of Eugene Cloonan has the same effect on a generation of Galway hurling supporters as the first bars of Dolores Keane singing Teddy O’Neill has on De Dannan fans. They melt and sigh and become dreamy and wistful.

In Galway, Cloonan was Joe Canning before Joe Canning. The strange thing is that The West’s Asleep this week.

Yes, the flags are up and the interest is intense but the innocence and noise that characterised the first coming of Galway hurling has been swept away in the bittersweet years that have followed. But they are steeled for disappointment now.

That Galway are playing the greatest hurling team ever tomorrow makes the task they face perfectly clear.

In a way, nothing has changed since the great O’Hehir was preparing to draw the curtains on his 1980 commentary, looking at the scoreboard from his green perch in the old Hogan stand in slight disbelief at the scoreboard and a maroon tinted sky.

Galway weren’t supposed to win in 1980 and they aren’t really supposed to win tomorrow either.