Kevin Walsh points to positives from drawn game after Connacht final replay victory

SEÁN MORAN at McHale Park On a day when the league index - football's own gold standard - took a bit of a tumble with two teams who had spent spring in Division Two defeating top-flight opposition in provincial finals the significance of it all didn't escape victorious Galway manager Kevin Walsh.

His side’s fluent, attacking three-goal display confounded the crash inspectors at the previous week’s drawn Connacht final by delivering an accomplished performance to overwhelm Roscommon.

“I would certainly feel that we took a lot of positives out of last week. Albeit the type of game we all watched was hard to watch but there was a lot of good structure to it. Of course, it’s a Division One side - we knew that with the way the draw was made out that we would have to take out two Division One teams to win a Connacht title, and it ended up that we had to go three times against Division One sides and came out on top twice and drawn the other one.

“We also knew that the standard of the Connacht championship this year was going to be really high. Going back to the Mayo five-in-a-row I don’t think they had to beat any Division One side in any of those years. We just felt it was going to be tough and when you have that in your head there is a huge task in front of you and it certainly helped us and we mapped that out for a while.”

Whereas he accepted that the performance in the drawn match - deemed by some to have caused the death of the old game - hadn’t been great and was glad that his team had run a bit freer this time the Galway manager wasn’t conceding anything to the serried ranks of punditry.

Analysis

“Unfortunately for the players and management you’re analysed to death by everybody who has time to do that. Unfortunately in your own profession you don’t get analysed as much as we do - even those up in the studio don’t. It’s fine to throw stuff out there and if we have a bad day out we’ve no choice but to go back to the drawing board.

“Maybe in journalism if you’re badly out, maybe let someone else come in and take the piece for next week and you go back to something else. You’re not analysed as much as we are. We’ve no choice but to put the heads down and make things better.”

That task in spades awaits defeated opponents Roscommon whose resilience and steady nerves had contrived the replay only for that extra life to be snuffed out with the first quarter hardly counted down.

Joint-manager Kevin McStay accepted that it had been all over by half-time.

“It was a tough day, a really tough day. The game got away from us early. After half-time really, we were just playing for pride and with half an eye on next weekend, at the same time. I didn’t think it would work out this way. Galway were, by a mile, the better team. They got off to a flier and built and built and built. We just couldn’t come to terms with that. We were behind in most areas of the game. I didn’t expect that either.

They now await Monday morning’s draw to see which of Clare or Derry thwy will be paired with in next weekend’s final qualifier round.

“We have to go back now and have a big look at it for next weekend and see can we turn it around. The game is Saturday. It is six-day turnaround. The boys have put a big effort in this week. We rested them up as best we could. Galway just hit us with a hurricane. The goals really, really blew the game wide open.”