TOM HUMPHRIESon how county success is being built on the blossoming of the game in a town which was once a desert when it came to football
TOWN AND country. When Dublin go to Galway tomorrow to Salthill they will play in a city where football has clung on and prospered against the odds. In the glory days of the ’60s Tuam Stars and Dunmore men seemed to comprise the entire GAA firmament. Now football is a city game and the architects of that revival have their blueprint spread out for the county side.
When Tony Regan and Liam Sammon started work on revitalising the former St Kieran’s club in Salthill in the early 1970s their ambitions were modest enough. But a tipping point comes and the momentum of progress becomes progress itself.
TONIGHT ANOTHER Galway city club, St Michael’s, are in Croke Park. Salthill were senior club champions three years ago, Sammon manages the Galway senior footballers. Tony Regan is out in charge of sports at NUI Galway. Good times.
“There are a lot of people watching this Galway team and hopeful about them,” says Tony Regan. “And if our club sides do well that brings more of a boost. When a club starts to move it brings a lot with it. These club competitions have been good for clubs in Galway that needed rejuvenation.”
Galway at Pearse Park tomorrow are a fascinating and rejuvenating prospect themselves. To most of us they are the team that lost out on that remarkable day last August in Croke Park. Remember? We were nostalgic for it before the pavements had even dried.
An afternoon of biblical floods and preternatural darkness in the city. As Jones’s Road became Little Venice, Galway, playing the sprightly brand of football that any Liam Sammon team promises, banished the gloaming and almost toppled Kerry. That quarter-final was perhaps the game of the year.
Maybe there was an innocence about Galway’s quest which Tyrone’s eventual win placed into damning context but to see a side eschewing the training methods of rugby teams and letting the ball rather than the upper body do the hard work was refreshing and interesting. Football used to be played this way didn’t it?
Tomorrow Galway entertain Dublin in the west and if you are seriously looking for the most attractive football fixture of the weekend you will be there.
Dublin are moving towards a model of quick transfer and improved mobility. Galway are committed to fast, attacking football and scored 2-10 on a bitterly cold National League opening afternoon in Mullingar. If the game is going to take one of its periodic tactical lurches tomorrow could be a day which we will mark in our calendars.
It would be mete and fitting were it to be so. Galway’s last All-Ireland came in 2001 and the show shut down for effectively the duration of what some will remember as the puke-football era. John O’Mahony’s team grew old quickly and the following summer Kerry suffocated them by eight points but Armagh, all beef and power, won the All-Ireland.
Two years later the P45s finally went out. Tyrone, playing listlessly, put Galway out of the qualifiers. The game had moved on. Tough times beckoned. Westmeath bounced Galway out of the 2006 qualifiers. A year later Sligo became Connacht champions at Galway’s expense. Again the qualifier run was short.
TOMORROW AT Pearse Park is interesting not least because Liam Sammon will be on one sideline and Mickey Whelan will be part of the set-up on the other. Two men from a different era of Gaelic football, fellas who have stuck to their beliefs in how the game should be played.
When county boards go looking for managers not many stars of the ’60s are asked for their CVs but Galway and Dublin could be on to something with their return to a brisker more stylish game.
In Galway the results of Sammon’s conviction have been there to see. The Westmeath win was their fifth of 2009. In last year’s league they lost out on a place in the final after winning five of their seven games under new management. As in the championship, it was defeat to Kerry that cost them.
Galway have resumed this winter where they left off in the floods of last August. The FBD Connacht League was an unbeaten canter giving them the chance to showcase yet more young attacking material – Eoin Concannon, Jonathan Ryan and Martin Coady being added to the holding pattern of cutting-edge weaponry hovering above the first team.
IT’S A GOOD time for Galway football and interest in what goes down in Pearse Stadium tomorrow will be heightened by the fate of St Michael’s in tonight’s intermediate All-Ireland final in Croke Park. Galway have done well in the senior club competition in the past few years (Caltra, Corofin and Salthill-Knocknacarra all winning out) but the bonus has been the progress of clubs like Moycullen Caherlistrane and now St Michael’s at intermediate level bringing through players like Gareth Bradshaw, Eddie Hoare and Cormac Bane.
St Michael’s are interesting too in that they are a city club and represent the surprising blossoming of the game in a town which was once a desert when it came to football.
“At the time of the three-in-a-row team in the ’60s there would have been very little football in Galway city at all. Fr Griffins (with whom Liam Sammon kicked football) were the only team in the city and they weren’t really a city team, they were mainly gardaí and army who were stationed here. That has changed.”
At the same time inspired by the three-in-a-row team the St Michael’s club set out its stall as a juvenile club and had some successes at minor level in the ’70s.
Salthill-Knocknacarra became All-Ireland champions in 2005. St Michael’s play the All-Ireland intermediate final tonight and join them in the senior ranks. Across the city St James won’t be far behind.
“St James should have gone senior in the last couple of years but they will be senior in next few years,” says Regan.
Founded in 1994 in the soccer areas of Renmore and Mervue, St James won back-to-back county minor titles in 200/2007 and are expected to graduate from intermediate soon.
The new Galway, with Liam Sammon’s positive take on football fashioning their complexion have yet to figure out how far they can take things.
“It’s interesting in terms of what the compromise will be,” says Tony Regan. “There is great interest in this team. But the Ulster sides have that sort of toughness and uncompromising nature about them. Can you just break it down with speed and passing? How do you cope with that? How do you do it in the white heat in Croke Park on a big day?”
Those are the questions. Galway have been there once now. It wasn’t an Ulster team, it was Kerry. And it wasn’t white hot. It was monsoon time. But Joe Bergin’s goal wasn’t enough to guide them home.
This year is about learning and progression and stepping up further. This year is for guys like Seán Armstrong and Cormac Bane and Gareth Bradshaw to step up to the next level. Five wins from five starts so far but it starts tomorrow really on a big weekend for Galway football and a big weekend for the city.
