Goodbye to glory or bust suits Galway

LEINSTER SHC KILKENNY v GALWAY: KEITH DUGGANon how much calmer the men from the west are facing Kilkenny now all is no longer riding on it

WHATEVER GALWAY bring into the eagerly awaited fiesta with Kilkenny, players and public alike are determined to leave foolish thoughts west of the Shannon. This year’s encounter with the black and amber battleship does not come with the emotionally draining glory-or-bust absolutism that has defined their encounters throughout the decade.

Already, participating in the Leinster championship has given the Westerners a more reasonable perspective. Losing to Kilkenny does not mean the end of the road. And because Kilkenny’s form has left them unassailable in the eyes of the hurling public, there is strangely little pressure on Galway this time around. They are not favourites to win and they are not widely expected to win.

How could the most inconsistent and unreadable hurling county of the last 10 years be favoured against the team whose very heartbeat depends on its players turning up primed and ready Sunday after Sunday?

Perhaps that is why Galway manager John McIntyre could afford the nicely weighted bit of gallows humour that appeared on the front of the sports supplement he edits yesterday. “Some people were of the view last week that we would have been better off going to Knock or to Lourdes instead of heading to our training camp.”

It was a throwaway observation, perhaps, but it represented a marked departure from the traditional voice emanating from Galway camps on the eve of crunch championship games, when the rallying cries were always brave and earnest and sometimes, it seemed, designed to convince the squad as much as the public. The old championship system asked – demanded – that Galway teams strike the precise balance between inspiration and desperation so they could come cold into All-Ireland quarter or semi-finals having tuned into the same level of sharpness and mental toughness as their opposition.

That the Galway vintage of 1987 and 1988 mastered it so spectacularly has arguably been to the detriment of the generations who found the pressure of having their entire year’s worth of training distilled into just one match oppressive. For Galway hurling people, the championship season often lasted about as long as the mayfly and the more crushing disappointments – Wexford in ’96, Waterford in ’98, Clare in ’99 and Cork in ’08 led to a frantic need for change, be it of players or management. And so the cycle went on. This year, it feels calmer.

“When has the Galway hurling public ever been this alert and ready for the All-Ireland championship in mid-June?” marvels Damien Coleman, hurling development officer in the county.

“The team has everything to play for now. We have guaranteed games and have a wonderful opportunity because for any management team, it is a question of getting the right formation. Go back to last July when Cork beat us in Semple Stadium, that was last chance saloon for Ger Loughnane. Being in Leinster gives the team a chance to get their confidence levels up and get rid of the doubts and for the management to assure guys not to worry, to go out and play with abandon.

“Paudie Butler (the GAA’s national hurling co-ordinator) and myself were invited down to the Galway camp last week and we took them for a few hours of wall-ball sessions. And I saw an appetite there, a hunger and a desire and I also saw something a bit different; an appetite to be the best they can be and to maximise their potential.”

Coleman’s work with the bringing through the best young players in the county leaves him in a strong position to analyse the popular myth that the Galway senior hurling panel has, over the past 15 years, become something of a graveyard for the expectations of outstanding teenage players who would surely have flourished in other counties.

Various names from the lost decade pop up over the conversation. Coleman hurled at minor and under-21 level with Darragh Coen, the flying, goal-poaching craftsman who collected minor and under-21 All-Ireland medals but whose senior career was, incredibly, limited to one championship start on the nightmarish day against Waterford in 1998.

There were plenty of others. Peter Kelly, another player on Mattie Murphy’s famous ’92 minor side, was considered superfluous to Galway needs by the age of 20. Francis Forde finished up when he was 25.

Just last week, there was a photograph of Ollie Canning, absolutely indispensable to the maroon squad, trying to clear a ball under pressure for Portumna in a local championship match against Beagh. The man exerting the pressure was Rory Gantley, another exceptional young hurler who was hurried from the ringing applause and garlands of the minor stage and ushered into the darker reality of Galway hurling.

Gantley was too good to simply cast aside but he was in and out of the team – he hurled minor for three years before debuting for the seniors short of his 18th birthday in 1996 – and although he was a regular in the panel until 2005, he is another vivid example of the failure within Galway hurling to make the most of its talents.

“Rory is a fine club hurler now and is leading Beagh in a revival. He would be an outstanding hurler and is probably one of the guys who slipped through the net in Galway,” acknowledges Coleman.

“See, it takes a special kind of mentality to say: ‘I am above this and I am going to nail it’. Because of the kind of structures that existed, guys may not have got the second chance There are a lot of hurlers here, yeah. But we have a lot around the same ability level. It is the world of opinion we are living in for a long time in Galway.

When you look at a development process, a guy needs a year or two to settle into any team. There are plenty of lads that went off the Galway panel totally into oblivion after great minor years. Had they been in Offaly, say, they would get three to five years to develop and wouldn’t be gone after a single game.

“If a guy shows enormous potential, just because he has one bad afternoon doesn’t mean he won’t improve. But I think guys can go backward then and there is a quick fix, somebody else coming in. Because we only get one decent game – if a young lad gives his heart and soul to a year and trains 80 times but has one bad 70 minutes, that world of opinion can leave him dispensable.”

Through all that flux and shattered young players and managerial heaves, there have been a few hugely bright days for Galway senior hurling in the last decade, days that for unexpected thrill and audacity were reminiscent of the 1980s. Chief among those days came in the All-Ireland semi-finals against Kilkenny, in 2001 and 2005.

And for all countless auditions that have been held down the years, several players have survived the furious years of change and reinvention. The image of a teenage Richie Murray impudently crashing into Brian McEvoy before the throw-in summed up the story of 2001.

Murray, David Tierney, Ollie Canning, Fergal Healy and Alan Kerins all started that day and each was in the running for a place on John McIntyre’s Galway team announced last night.

Flash forward to 2005 and all four were still present, joined by other regulars like Damien Hayes and Damien Joyce. Between the two meetings in ’01 and ’05, Kilkenny’s make-up had changed considerably as well: only Henry Shefflin and DJ Carey remained from the original forward unit, the midfield pairing was transformed (Comerford and McEvoy in ’01, Tommy Walsh and Derek Lyng in ’05). Players came and went in black and amber as well but those changes seemed to occur smoothly and with purpose, following the rhythm and form of a championship season, rather than trying to crack on the right formula, like in Galway.

When Galway and Kilkenny last met in the championship, in late July 2007, reality was suspended for a riveting hour before Kilkenny restored normal service by scoring 2-4 without reply in the last 10 minutes of the match to close out their win on a handsome scoreline of 3-22 to 1-18.

Afterwards, Eddie Brennan sounded relieved : “That first half was like 110 miles an hour. Everyone was out on their feet. We knew Galway were savage hurlers, savage fitness. Thankfully we made those two chances count. That was the difference. But other than that there wasn’t a poc of a ball between the teams.”

This might have been simply a generous appraisal from a winning player. But this Kilkenny squad has always been wary of the Galway bite. It is hard to judge when you’re talking about a squad that could bounce back from the 19-point hammering in the 2004 qualifiers in Thurles by engaging Kilkenny in an almost carefree shoot-out the following summer? That 2005 clash was a classic of free-scoring hurling which Galway effectively won by five goals to four, each side having fired eighteen points.

And although it seems hard to fathom now, it placed a degree of uncertainty over whether Brian Cody would wish to continue. Cork had been All-Ireland champions for the previous year and would win that year’s final against Galway. Kilkenny retreated to the homelands and have not been beaten in championship hurling since. So the thoroughbreds will be anxious to get on with it this afternoon.

The big imponderable is Joe Canning. The broad-shouldered Portumna man has borne the gathering hopes of his county with admirable lightness and left his mark on All-Ireland lore with last summer’s defiant one-man-show in the loss to Cork.

Canning is an exceptional sportsman but his rise as a Galway senior may be seen as the end of the frantic era to transform all those minor prodigies into source material for All-Irelands.

One thinks of the long and sometimes bleak station manned by Athenry’s Eugene Cloonan in the years when he stood at full forward to Galway. He had his bright days, of course – none more than the 2-9 he posted against Kilkenny in that 2001 match – but it would now seem as if he is set to join the lengthening list of illustrious Galway hurlers never to win a senior All-Ireland.

Canning is young and fearless enough to simply take each coming season in his stride without bothering to study the twenty that have passed. And he is beginning his senior life at the perfect time, when Galway are no longer the sometimes brilliant interlopers to the traditional All-Ireland championship but are, instead, guests of Leinster. Canning has already collected honours with startling speed: being on the first Galway team to claim a Leinster senior title would be a welcome addition.

And the provincial dimension should deepen the bite in Tullamore this evening. Remember Brian Cody falling to the ground after Wexford’s late raid in the Leinster final in 2004? Imagine how galling the notion of being shown the door by a Galway team would be. Even if a fourth successive All-Ireland were achieved in September, the fact of losing in Leinster would forever gall the many perfectionists who have made Kilkenny hurling what it is.

So in a strange way, Galway can, for once, just turn up and play. Already, it is as though their inclusion in Leinster has removed the frenetic nerves and blind faith of old. There have been no bold promises of victory this week, just a quiet vow to perform.

“If that will happen in Tullamore, I don’t know,” vice captain Damien Joyce said this week as he ruminated on Galway’s ability to match the All-Ireland champions

“But all we want, for now, is a complete, honest and committed performance from everyone.”

For now. That equivocation speaks volumes. Yes, Kilkenny and Galway has the makings of a midsummer night’s dream. But whatever happens, Galway hurling people will wake up to find the summer still exists.