When the circus comes to town, it’s only natural to want a front-row seat, right?
That was how it felt for Galway hurling in September 2006 with confirmation of Ger Loughnane’s return to the intercounty game after an absence of six years. You could sense a giddiness in our people, a belief that, finally, the county had access to some kind of evangelical presence for whom anything less than All-Ireland success would be tantamount to a personal slight. Loughnane as much as said so himself, making the bold declaration that he’d consider his tenure at the helm a failure if Galway were not in possession of the MacCarthy Cup within two years.
For many, this felt like our golden ticket. The man’s optimism was irresistible. After an eternity in the wilderness, Clare had won the All-Irelands of 1995 and 1997, through what felt like sheer force of personality. Loughnane’s personality. I was still just a child while that story was evolving, but there was no escaping the charisma of the man, the absolute conviction he carried with him into just about any environment.
Hurling might have changed in the decade since, but Ger remained one of the game’s more compelling voices. He’d become a fixture in the TV studio as a pundit on The Sunday Game and was an often unapologetically withering newspaper columnist with the Irish Star. In replacing Conor Hayes, he became Galway’s first outside manager since Babs Keating in 1979. The appointment felt seismic.
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I was neither deaf nor blind to any of that, given that Hayes had made tentative soundings about me joining the Galway seniors in 2006 (minors manager, Mattie Murphy, naturally batting away any enquiries about the availability of his captain).
It was obvious that there’d be speculation around my intentions again now that the county had effectively gone to Broadway for their new man.
But my head was clear. Heading into my third and final year with Galway minors, I was asked if it would be my intention to make myself available for the seniors in 2007. I pretty much said then that it wouldn’t be, that there was still plenty I wanted to do outside of hurling, and that, in my opinion, life as a senior intercounty player could wait.
What people maybe didn’t realise was that I missed out on playing minor again in 2007 by just two months. I was still, essentially, a kid. As I kept saying at the time, I wanted to live a teenager’s life.
Maybe people assumed that Loughnane’s appointment seven months later would flip that idea on its head, but if so, they didn’t know me. I have always had an obstinacy that only deepens the moment I sense people making assumptions about me. Hand on heart, it never entered my head that I’d be missing out on something monumental by not submitting instantly to the new regime.
Once I’d said something, I’d very seldom go back on it. But would I have been so stubborn had I genuinely believed they could win the All-Ireland in 2007? It’s hard to see it. I mean, I wouldn’t want to miss out on that, would I?
There were representations made, admittedly. Brendan Lynskey, one of Loughnane’s selectors, met me one day at Kilmeen Cross near Loughrea. What do I remember of the meeting? Little beyond the fact that he drove a really big, eye-catching car and had the complexion of a man just back from a sunshine holiday.
Being honest, Brendan was trying to push open a firmly bolted door.
Louis Mulqueen, another selector, then met me in Limerick in early 2007 and bought me a pizza in Milano’s. He even got me to agree to go to a team meeting in Athenry, and for the life of me, I still have no real idea why I did that. Probably just some kind of diplomatic reflex.
Louis’s idea was that I might just “get a feel” of what they were doing, but I knew I really had no place in that group.
I didn’t go back.
There was no direct sales pitch from Loughnane himself, who I suspect might have been vaguely offended that I wasn’t absolutely desperate to be a part of this new Galway story. My sense of it is that his ego could have been bruised.
In fact, when I won the Fitzgibbon as a first year in LIT just weeks into 2007, he delivered a fairly scathing verdict to the Star on where I might stand as a potential senior intercounty hurler. I didn’t actually see the piece myself at the time, but my family did.
They kept the cutting.
In it, Ger described the Fitzgibbon as “a Mickey Mouse competition”, suggesting that I’d be very foolish if I let the achievement of winning one go to my head. He warned that I was in real danger of never fulfilling my potential, arguing that I was being “pumped up by people despite scoring very little from play”.
Loughnane’s view was that I was “way off the pace” of senior intercounty and that “listening to ill-deserved praise is going to do him more harm than good”. His conclusion: “I’d be very doubtful at this stage if he has what it takes to cut it as an intercounty hurler.”
It’s kind of strange reading those words given that he’d already sent two of his selectors to try and get me to go in, but in hindsight, maybe he was having as much of a dig at Davy Fitzgerald in that interview as he was at me.
It was Fitzy’s second Fitzgibbon win with a college that had never won previously, and he was clearly establishing a coaching and management reputation that, to this day, has kept him at the cutting edge of the game. I’m not entirely sure Ger ever warmed to the idea of his old goalkeeper making fresh history of his own.
[ Ger Loughnane and the spark that lit Clare’s hurling revolutionOpens in new window ]
To be fair, that thread of extremism in Loughnane’s personality is almost certainly what got Clare to the mountaintop in the mid-90s. Bearing in mind that their Munster title win in 1995 was the county’s first since 1932, I imagine it would be hard to overstate the importance of a genuine revolutionary’s voice in that dressingroom.
But in Galway, that voice just never quite resonated with the same credibility.
In two championships, the county’s only victories under Loughnane would be against Laois and Antrim (both twice). I always sensed in subsequent years that he never quite forgave the Galway players for this, specifically for not buying more unequivocally into the starkness of his gospel. To him, we just proved ourselves a soft bunch, and he was never subsequently slow to communicate that belief.
The day Galway went out of the 2007 championship with a 10 points All-Ireland quarter-final loss to Kilkenny, I watched the game from a pub in Brussels. It was a stag weekend for a first cousin of mine, Shane McClearn, and it’s fair to say I was feeling absolutely no pain.
No question the fallout to our county final defeat by Loughrea the previous year still stung us, but I was about to win an All-Ireland under-21 title with Galway in the coming months and had every intention of making myself available to the seniors once I felt the time was right.
Among their training venues, Galway were using the sand track in Tubber, a place notorious for burning off anyone remotely equivocal in commitment.
It was all, I don’t doubt, a mental challenge that Loughnane was setting Galway’s players now. A way of saying, “Everybody says ye’re soft, go prove them wrong!” You could recognise the logic to it too.
It would be March of 2008 before I was finally ready to experience the torture chamber for myself, specifically the week after Portumna’s All-Ireland club final defeat of Birr.
We’d basically been on the beer since St Patrick’s Day, when six or seven of us were called down to Athenry for a session.
As the hurling field was flooded, we ended up doing a circuit of weights instead in the makeshift gym they’d made in the underground car park of Raheen Woods Hotel. It was a gym that never really made sense to me, the ceiling little more than six feet above your head, everything a little sooty and dusty, so much so that some of us found it nearly a struggle just to breathe.
Barking and shouting alone was never going to win us over, but I suspect Loughnane had long concluded that that could be the very thing – maybe the only thing – that might put some much-needed steel into our hurling
The session proved little more scientific than challenging lads to bench-press the heaviest weights they could. After that, into our cars and out to what can only be described as a real cabbage-patch field with a tiny shed where we were sent off to run laps.
For the Portumna contingent, our guts still full of beer, this was pure hell on earth.
It was originally supposed to be just a ball-work session in Kenny Park, easing us back into it that evening. But that waterlogged pitch put paid to the idea, and we found ourselves instead doing the polar opposite of what had been flagged.
I’ll always remember Andy Smith – categorically the toughest of our crew – hopping a wall at one point to get sick on the other side. Soon enough, he just abandoned. Actually, my most enduring memory of that night is of lads vomiting pretty much everywhere.
Barking and shouting alone was never going to win us over, but I suspect Loughnane had long concluded that that could be the very thing – maybe the only thing – that might put some much-needed steel into our hurling.
His first championship as Galway manager had left people generally unimpressed, specifically an Ennis All-Ireland qualifier loss to his native Clare now managed by his old sidekick, Tony Considine.
As you will gather, it took time for us Portumna lads to adjust to Ger’s revolutionary ways, specifically to the off-the-wall intensity of training.
Things that worked for him in 1995 seemed hopelessly outdated now. One of the drills he had us doing was two lads standing maybe 10 yards in from either sideline driving the ball out over one another’s heads, the idea being that you had to turn back, rise the ball and clear it away over your shoulder as far as you could. Striking it blindly, in other words. Ger reckoned we needed to be better at this.
When match day came, there were no identifiable tactics either; though, being honest, hurling at the time wasn’t especially tactical anyway beyond Cork’s short stick-passing and Kilkenny’s withdrawal of their half-forwards to congest the middle third.
As might be expected, Loughnane’s team talks generally compensated. He’d make the hair stand on the back of your neck with words full of fire and brimstone and rippling with questions targeting the very core of your being.
It was decided we should fly to Belfast for our championship opener against Antrim in Casement Park, and on arrival back in Galway, some of us went in to town on an evening that gave root to what became known as the story of “the Dew Drop 15″.
The Dew Drop Inn is a well-known city pub, and that evening we sat outside in glorious sunshine, never imagining for a second that there was anything to worry about, even though our next game – against Laois – was just a week away.
But that night in the Dew Drop turned a little sour when one of the lads in our company (not a Galway player) decided to save money by drinking cans he’d bought from the Spar across the road. Not unreasonably, this was something the bar owner took exception to. Word of the resulting argument got back to Loughnane, who decided to take us to task at the next training session.
We were just pucking around in Salthill when the word came out: “Ger wants everybody back inside.”
He was demanding names.
“Who was drinking in Galway the other night?” he roared. To be honest, he needed to be more specific here because those of us in the Dew Drop hadn’t been the only ones out that night for a few pints. Anyway, nobody put their hand up. Nobody was ratting anybody out here.
This infuriated Ger and his selectors, with Louis Mulqueen berating us for showing the management no respect. He talked of all the hours they were putting into us, so much so that his own kids barely recognised him any more.
“Meanwhile, ye’re out drinking,” he snapped.
Given the silence from the floor, they duly sent us out for our punishment. Wire-to-wire shuttle runs, one sideline to the other.
Completely illogical in a week book-ended by two championship games, but that was always the tenor of it. The drinking shouldn’t have happened, albeit that was pretty much how things worked at the time, but to then run the crap out of us afterwards was madness.
We’ll show ye how it’s done! We’ll toughen ye!
Unfortunately, the runs then took their toll. Damien Joyce – a man who, incidentally, never touched a drink during championship – pulling a hamstring that would rule him out of the Laois game. Damien, probably the fittest hurler in Galway, thus became an unintended victim of our punishment.
That Laois game was played on a Saturday, and management had us in for an eight-kilometre run around Pearse Stadium the following morning. Rumour had it that one of the management team had been in conversation with Davy Fitzgerald that evening (Fitzy having taken over the Waterford team mid-championship after a player revolt against Justin McCarthy), and he’d indicated that they’d be running on Tramore strand that same morning, having hammered Antrim the day before.
Essentially, this would be a means of ensuring that the players didn’t go drinking that Saturday night.
So that’s what we did less than 24 hours after beating Laois.
An 8km run around the stadium in Salthill, the vibe from management being: “If Waterford’s players are willing to absorb this hardship, it’s high time Galway did something similar.”
Except, of course, Waterford never did have that run in Tramore. I remember asking Fitzy when I got back to LIT. “We did like f**k,” he replied, laughing.
As you will gather, intensity had become God in our world.
Endgame
No question, the pain of Galway’s early departure from championship in 2024 was compounded by the identity of the opposition’s manager.
Hand on heart, the idea of Micheál Donoghue managing a Leinster opponent just didn’t sit well with me from the moment he was announced as Dublin’s new boss. I said as much at the time in texts I sent to himself and selectors Franny Forde and Noel Larkin.
Not the most gracious sentiment, I accept, but I didn’t like it. I still don’t.
Without Micheál Donoghue in our lives, we wouldn’t have won an All-Ireland, and we all know that. But hurling sometimes brings us to the rawest of places, and often, only time allows us to make adult sense of the emotion
Believe it or not, Davy Burke would have been one of those arguing the toss with me at the time. Though he was still playing, he seemed far less affronted by the idea of our All-Ireland-winning manager taking over a county we’d be in direct championship opposition with. Burkey’s view was that Micheál probably felt a need to keep his hand in at intercounty level. In other words, to stay relevant. The game at that level moves so fast, it doesn’t take long to end up being left behind. Just look at Ger Loughnane. He was out of the intercounty game for 10 years and found it had totally changed when taking over Galway in 2007.
My view was less conciliatory.
You see, the Galway players still wanted Micheál as their manager when he decided to step down in 2019, and I would have been only one of many members of that dressingroom to have gone to his house in Clarinbridge a number of times, making that very case.
[ Micheál Donoghue set for return as Galway senior hurling managerOpens in new window ]
My belief is that the Galway players have never really stopped wanting Micheál back, but he had his reason for leaving at the time, and for all of us, the primary one was a county board with some prehistoric tendencies and attitudes.
A board that is now gone.
Seeing Micheál in a Dublin tracksuit the day they dumped us from the 2024 championship just ran against the grain for me. And it’s probably no secret that the immediate reaction of Dublin’s management to that 16th-minute collision [that saw Davy Burke sent off] probably didn’t help Burkey’s case when the referee subsequently went to his linesman.
I know that the mature view would be that Micheál, Noel and Franny are with Dublin now and have a duty to be in that camp unequivocally. Any other approach would be plain wrong.
But put yourself in Davy Burke’s shoes for a moment.
He’d have been Micheál’s main man all through 2016 to 2019, the two of them chatting a multiple of times every week. In other words, they (and we) went to war together and came out the far side, bonded by something for the rest of our lives.
So that moment in Salthill – for me, at least – was uncomfortable.
The friendships will survive. Without Micheál Donoghue in our lives, we wouldn’t have won an All-Ireland, and we all know that. But hurling sometimes brings us to the rawest of places, and often, only time allows us to make adult sense of the emotion.
Maybe that’s why it has such a presence in our lives.
It’s more than a game to us. Far more.
Joe Canning: My Story is published by Gill Books and is available in all bookshops, priced at €24.
