LOCKER ROOM:Could this be the year when Galway finally deliver a team worthy of Joe Canning, writes TOM HUMPHRIES

IT WAS cold in Parnell Park yesterday unless you were from Galway, in which case you arrived with St Patrick’s Day and the dull scent of shamrocks in your nostrils and left with a ripening sense of summer’s promise in your heart.

Portumna, as expected, brooked no nonsense from a fired-up Dunloy side and handed in an efficient and ruthless performance which they will seldom think of again. Of perhaps more interest in the longer run was the curtain-raiser – Galway v Dublin. The Walsh Cup final. Not an event for which the Winter Olympics folks would be keen to avoid a scheduling clash but an interesting hour of hurling all the same.

Let’s digress a little here and then get back to the main road. Have you noticed it is a mark of Joe Canning’s greatness that every year when he presents for duty in the Fitzgibbon Cup and the early league skirmishing that his shape and lustre are critiqued as if he were a prize marrow at a fete.

Somebody (and quite often that somebody would be me because I do not live in a glasshouse and therefore have license to throw such stones) will see him score 7-19 from play in a college game and then, when asked to bear witness later on, note that “yerra he was alright but he had a big ole arse hanging off him”. Or that he was toting a bit of a gut. The Ned Kelly was in fine shape. Won’t do for the summer. Won’t do.

Any wonder the young fella, with commendable self-deprecation sometimes describes himself as slow and one-sided. There are days, like that one a couple of weeks ago in the Mardyke when he destroyed UCC in a mire of glue and muck, days when he has no right to thrive as a big man and nothing to prove anyway but the nature of greatness is that, though there may be different settings, there is no off-switch.

And there are times like yesterday in Parnell Park when he senses early the prevailing winds of the game and permits himself to be central only when needed.

And always we debate over him and the precise calibration at which his stature can be measured and compared. We should just roll with it and enjoy it.

Anyway here’s where the digression ends. There are no rolling acres of Joe this year. No soft spaces serving as a billboard for an easy-going nature. He looks leaner and meaner than he has done in many Februarys.

And strangely, as the Walsh Cup final showed, there are no rolling acres of maroon-clad flesh either. Galway, who stuttered through last season’s league with cold showers and tongue lashings from John McIntyre serving as their warm-down routine most days, are in fine fettle for this time of the year. Fine fettle and still awaiting their delivery of Portumna men sometime in April.

When Galway crashed out of the championship last year, having given but a glimpse of their potential one evening in Tullamore against Kilkenny (2-9 that evening for Canning), John McIntyre said he would lie awake at nights permitting himself to be haunted by the details. Like any good manager he didn’t just lie awake in a cold sweat remembering Waterford blow past him. He lay there thinking of what might be done to make sure it never happens again.

Hence the lean and hungry look to this Galway team. The well has been made deeper by the return of players like David Collins and Tony Óg Regan, and the emergence as a serious option of Joe Gantley, the latest of the Beagh family production line. Yesterday Galway rolled over Dublin in a manner which was depressingly redolent of the old pre-Daly revolution days. They moved the sliotar around as they wanted to and again and again they found each other where they expected to be.

Bigger than that though there was a scent of that which we have been looking for from Galway for half a decade now, the fragrance of promise about to be consummated. Could this be the year that the county could deliver a senior team worthy of its prince. Sometimes it ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it. Galway took Dublin apart with attitude.

(It doesn’t always happen. In Chicago before the Bulls became kings of the NBA they used to think that they would never find a bunch of team-mates worthy to tie Michael Jordan’s running shoes. But Phil Jackson finally found a supporting cast who were willing to be something more than a supporting cast. Most of the players they went with before success arrived were happy to bask in the sunshine which Jordan provided. For success Jordan had to give a little, the rest of his team had to give a lot and they found they had a side which was more than the sum of its parts.)

Since 2004 when we first got whiff of Canning’s reputation as a boy wonder we have fretted as to whether Galway could deliver a side who would match him and his potential. Would he end up being one of those GAA genius types who get trapped within the hapless county of their birth, men who get talked about in saloon bar arguments as to who was the best never to win a senior All-Ireland medal.

As the comet that is Canning continues its journey across our consciousness we need to move from the springtime guess-his-weight competitions to a consideration of what a long-term change to hurling a period of Galway ascendancy would make.

Canning’s first feature appearance, as a minor is over half a decade ago now. It’s five years since the boy posted that 1-11 in the Galway county final or four years since that All-Ireland club final against Newtownshandrum when he helped himself to 1-6. He has long since moved from being a legend of the minor grade to claiming a permanent place in Fitzgibbon Cup lore.

His years are long and his heroic deeds are many but, if he is to be more than a gloriously entertaining statistical footnote, Galway owe him a return on his excellence.

We need of course to be wary of the idea of March and warier still of the ides of February but sometimes you catch a team going about its business early in a season and it strikes you that there has been a shift in that team’s personality.

It was cold in Parnell Park yesterday and the Walsh Cup meant little or less to Galway in the curtain-raiser while the All-Ireland club semi-final was just a stepping stone for Portumna. Yet the big picture was different. There was a hum and a buzz. Galway are serious. Joe is serious.

We came away yearning for the summer with childish impatience.