Tom Humphrieson a provincial final as much about which side is best suited to rejoining the All-Ireland elite as it is about Connacht silverware

WILL GALWAY beat Mayo? Will Galway beat Mayo? Ah, nobody seems too certain, nobody seems to know. And if they do, what would it do to the broader landscape of this year's football season? The status of the Connacht championship is in limbo after Sligo's rather shocking descent into mediocrity since last year's final.

The province needs to re-estabish its national relevance and tomorrow is as much about which side is best equipped to do that as it is about going home with silver. And the rest of the summer is about reasserting the province's right to be taken seriously.

Galway occupy a strange place in this year's football championship. Every argument about them carries gaping holes in it. They looked sprightly in the National League after a convincing gallop through the Connacht League. In their first-round trimming of a woeful Roscommon side they evinced signs of becoming clinical again but nobody would be surprised to see them lose a Connacht final tomorrow with their old guru John O'Mahony inscrutably pulling the strings from the Mayo bench.

Against Leitrim, they looked strangely vulnerable in midfield for a county which has produced so many beanpoles with which to populate that area. O'Mahony will have noticed. In Connacht scarcely a sparrow falls . . .

There is a lot of smart money out there though that says Galway are one of just a small group of teams left in the championship proper who would trouble a Kerry side who suddenly don't look last year's Kerry side.

Galway are big and they play attacking football and carry that little bit of knowingness which Galway teams always have about them no matter how unkind recent history has been to them.

Mayo? Even with O'Mahony back home directing the production can they shake themselves of the curse which paralyses them every time they hit a well-lit stage?

So Galway to be part of the summer storyline again? Only under special circumstances. If they were to disappear into the dense and hostile foliage of the qualifiers few would expect to see them emerge out the other side. One of those tantalising sides.

Football is changing again and if the shifts aren't quite seismic Galway still seem curiously well equipped to be one of the defining teams of the nascent era. Their last All-Ireland, in 2001, effectively shut their show down for the duration of the so-called "puke football" era of Ulster dominance.

The Galway team given the kiss of life in 1998 by a Mayo man seemed suddenly to grow old. Men like Gary Fahy, Seán de Paor, Kevin Walsh and Ja Fallon appeared to skip categorisations quickly. One season they were experienced players, the next summer they were candidates for replacement.

Galway went away to a quiet place as Tyrone and Armagh robustly reshaped Gaelic football and the game waited, as it always does, for Kerry to adapt and respond. Galway didn't waste their time out of the limelight, though, and patient hoeing of their patch has produced a series of underage teams who appear to guarantee the county's footballing future. Galway may be emerging back into the limelight at just the right time.

In early August 2002, Galway, All-Ireland champions the previous summer, got a harsh warning note from Kerry about their own mortality. An All-Ireland quarter-final in Croke Park turned into a relative canter and Galway went under by eight points. Kerry went on to flatten Cork in the All-Ireland semi-final but by late September Armagh were All-Ireland champions and Galway seemed to have moved to a smaller stage at the summer festival.

O'Mahony, whose loyalty and affection for that particular group of players belied his reputation for being clinical, hung around patiently trying to revive the team he had created. If the stories of the Galway dressingroom being gone were exaggerated there seemed little doubt his team's time was nonetheless gone. He listened stoically to the talk of revolutionary things being done in Ulster and must have wished his side were young enough to issue an eloquent rebuttal.

The end of the O'Mahony era came two years later in front of a small crowd in Croke Park when Tyrone, by then reigning champions, listlessly imposed an eight-point defeat in a qualifier game.

Tyrone squandered chance after chance, having played some rope-a-dope with Galway in the first half, and the only news carried on the Monday sports pages was of the return of Peter Canavan after a 10-month absence. Two years after their second All-Ireland of the modern era Galway were sideshow fodder.

Galway, in a drawn and replayed league semi-final that spring and again in the first 20 minutes or so of that Saturday afternoon qualifier, ticked all the boxes in terms of willingness to change. They went about tracking and harassing Tyrone players and funnelling back dutifully. They hadn't the legs or the stomach for a full 70 minutes of the new game, though.

O'Mahony moved on to a sabbatical and Galway, slightly invigorated as teams often are by a new manager, found Peter Ford's fresh voice enough to propel them to another Connacht championship in 2005 but again their marginal place in the big world was underlined by the subsequent fate of their quarter-final conquerors Cork, who went on to lose yet another All-Ireland semi-final by a width that stretched into double figures.

Since then, Galway have limped through a couple of rather humiliating championships. Losing a Connacht final by a point to Mayo in 2006 was forgivable but Westmeath instantly ushered them out of the qualifiers. They looked even more poorly last year against Sligo in the Connacht final and again were instantly banished from the qualifiers, this time by Meath.

And yet tomorrow they have a whiff of cordite about them again. Liam Sammon, on the face of it, seemed an odd choice to come in as successor to a short series of younger and noticeably more intense managers.

Not many All-Ireland medallists from the 60s are being picked in this, the appliance-of-science era, for intercounty management jobs but Sammon's simple approach to training (constant ballwork) and football (expansive attacking) is so straightforward as to be almost revolutionary in itself.

His style and conviction have brought vastly improved form in the league, Galway losing out on a final place on scoring difference only after winning five of seven games (Laois, Kildare, Derry, Tyrone and Mayo) before a five-point defeat by Kerry in Salthill in the last round put a lid on rising expectations.

If Galway win tomorrow, though, and go on to make a dent in the championship Sammon will be the first to acknowledge that patient tending to the underage garden has brought about a good part of Galway's new sense of wellbeing.

Perhaps the most vital work of the late O'Mahony era was done, though, with the under-21 side of 2002, whittling and shaping the young men whose mature selves may come back to spook their old manager tomorrow.

In the final that year Galway took out a Dublin team whose panel included future luminaries Stephen Cluxton, Mossy Quinn, Paul Casey, Paul Griffin, Barry Cahill, Darren Magee, Conal Keaney, Bryan Cullen and Alan Brogan. Dublin virtually backboned an entire senior team out of that group.

Galway, their conquerors, harvested just as generous a crop, numerically speaking. Damien Blake, Michael Meehan Nicky Joyce and Matthew Clancy of that side start tomorrow's final but Kieran Comer and Joe Bergin, whose 2008 season has been stymied by injury, were already All-Ireland senior medal winners, and players like Kieran Fitzgerald, John Devane and Damien Burke came through as well.

That generation matured and while Galway entered recession and Ford found himself, after the O'Mahony era, having to cope with teaching a naturally exuberant footballing county the solemn arts of the new Ulster-style pressure game, at least the talent which was trying against type to scurry back and get behind the ball was maturing and a new wave was coming through and getting chances.

The age profile of the 1998 side (only Padraic Joyce and Declan Meehan survive on the panel a decade later) meant most spots on the Galway team were going to have a smart-boy-wanted sign hanging on them in the years which followed. There were opportunities. And there were players to take them.

Meehan, part of a dynasty and the most prodigious part at that, was already a legend by 2002, having dragged St Jarlath's to a famous colleges win via a final which was effectively a shoot-out between himself and Declan O'Sullivan of Coláiste na Sceilge, but for an under-21 side to cater so generously for the future attacking requirements of a county is a large bonus.

Galway have been able to take another St Jarlath's prodigy - Padraic Joyce captained the college to their previous Hogan Cup win in 1994 and have the luxury of being able to take his immaculate vision and wonderful left foot and wrap five underage talents around it, three from the 2002 All-Ireland under-21 side and two more - Cormac Bane and Fiachra Breathnach - from the 2005 side.

The wonder is Seán Armstrong, who got three of Galway's six goals in that mesmerisingly entertaining final with Down, has never really nailed down a place for Galway at senior level and now the pressure is coming from behind, with Paul Conroy of last year's All-Ireland-winning minor side pushing for a spot in the starting line-up.

If you were to plan a strategy for coming up with sustained senior success, Galway's recent record of two under-21 All-Irelands in three years followed two years later by their first minor title in 21 years seems exactly the right thing to be grafting on to a period which provided so much confidence to the county.

If the side of 2002 provided half of tomorrow's forwards, their successors in 2005 were just as conscientious about the county's other requirements. Finian Hanley and Gary Sice fill jerseys in defence, while Niall Coyne has seen plenty of action in the half-back line and missed out narrowly. Meanwhile, that year's midfield combo, Niall Coleman and Barry Cullinane, get the gig at midfield tomorrow.

Connacht football (though the province can point out in exasperation that Leinster hasn't produced an All-Ireland finalist in seven years) needs a tonic, something new.

If there was a gasp of barely suppressed disappointment in Leinster when Wexford reached another hurling decider wherein they would be swatted by Kilkenny, there is a limited appetite for investing emotionally again in Mayo among a footballing public who have had their hearts broken too many times.

Galway will find out a lot about themselves tomorrow. A football season which has been interesting but scarcely compelling could do with a transfusion of something different.