GAA: SIDELINE CUT:Galway hurling is always trying to recreate the halcyon days of 1988. Last Sunday's display showed how that quest has now become a farce, writes KEITH DUGGAN

IT WAS the most magical GAA photograph we will never see. We were among the last exiting Thurles on Sunday evening and the heat was still in the day. Philip King was on RTÉ Radio One giving his whispery sermons on Irish/Brooklyn folk music, the close leafy (never-ending) countryside of north Tipp rushing by and dusk falling, but still just about summery when we came into Portumna.

On the edge of town, a boy of eight or nine stood under streetlights holding a huge Galway flag and waved it as the car passed by. He looked like the last Galway hurling fan in the world. And in that hour he probably was.

Galway hurling people have known plenty of disappointment in the last two decades. But since the latest maroon debacle against Waterford last Sunday the psychoanalysts’ phones have been hopping as people gnash teeth and fret about the question they have asked a thousand times before: what is wrong with Galway hurling? Give ’em stick. Sylvie! People of Galway, we lof you! Lynskey! Keady! Joe Cooney! Gerry Mc and those white boots!

Just as the English never quite got over 1966, there is something of the Galway hurling mindset that never quite left the highpoint of their hurling legacy: 1988. The year of Lockerbie, George Herbert Bush, the death of Seán MacBride, Pet Shop Boys riding high in the charts and Galway hurling untouchable. They beat Tipperary well that September and were All-Ireland champions for the second year running and the feeling of being the best was so new and so strong that it must have felt like it was there to stay.

The grip that Galway hurling enjoyed for those two precious years was so firm that it feels much closer than the 23 years and counting since they let it go. And all of the summers since then have rushed by in a flash of tough breaks or hard luck stories of abject disappointments or managers who took the blame or free-takers whose entire careers were judged on one afternoon.

So many brilliant Galway minors have disappeared that it is a wonder a government tribunal was not set up.

There have been sporadic flashes of glories and just as many days like last Sunday, when Galway hurling teams went out and played as if they were caught in some bad dream.

The anger that Galway hurling fans felt last week had little to do with losing the game to Waterford. It was to do with the fact that they didn’t recognise their own team. It was like watching a group they had never seen before.

And yet they had seen it before too, because this was hardly the first Galway team to become afflicted by the paralysis and fear – of winning or of losing or of expectation – in the past 20 years.

And because the beating was so exceptional – "ten points and it could have been 20" sighed Cyril Farrell, mastermind of the great days, on The Sunday Game– the question has been asked again. What is wrong with Galway hurling? The answer that is rarely offered may be the most simple and the most painful; it just isn't good enough.

There are two stories within the current Galway hurling squad. The first is that the team is extending a tradition of failure within the county which is now two decades old.

The second is that it is doing so despite having a player of extravagant, exceptional gifts, a hurler that the connoisseurs compare to the very greatest. Joe Canning had barely made his confirmation when the ‘wait’ for his debut as a senior hurler had begun. The glittering minor career put all other glittering Galway minor careers in the ha’penny place and the Portumna lad was so laid back and grounded that it was clear that he could cope with the pressure and the adulation. He wasted no time in confirming his brilliance when Ger Loughnane cut the ribbons.

But from the beginning there was this uneasy sense of an irrepressible talent weighed down with the expectations of a county rather than supported by it.

In Thurles, Canning cut a frustrated figure. It was hard not to think of Athenry’s Eugene Cloonan, whose exploits against Brian Lohan back in 1997 led to the trumpet sounds for another stellar career.

Cloonan was a different kind of player – shy rather than sunny – and he had some splendid days in a Galway shirt but sooner or later it began to dawn on people that Cloonan’s gifts would not guarantee him an All-Ireland medal. And on Sunday, looking at Canning raise his arms in resignation, it seemed entirely possible that the Portumna man might well endure the same frustrations.

Galway holds a funny place in the hurling hierarchy; it is simultaneously its brightest hope and its problem child. Ever since Joe Connolly did his famous Pope JPII impersonation in 1980, the hurling hierarchy has never been quite sure what to make of Galway. Decades of modest All-Ireland speeches made by Tipp, Cork and Kilkenny captains and along come Galway, jaunty and cocksure, and this is the line that is remembered.

The animosity that ripened between Tipperary and Galway in 1989 must have stemmed from a deep-rooted desire in Tipperary to remind Galway of who stood where in the traditional pecking order.

For the establishment, Galway hurling people must have sounded like malcontents, griping about the system – wanting more championship games but not wanting to go into Leinster and so on.

Meanwhile, Mattie Murphy would arrive in Croke Park with these coltish, beautiful maroon teams every September and more often than not beat the pick of the country. In the Ard Comhairle, people would shake their heads and ponder the mysteries of Galway hurling. You’d wonder, they would say, why they aren’t winning more.

The answer could be that in every year since 1988, there was a better hurling team out there. But that is not the question any more anyway. The quest – to zoom back to ’88 in a DeLorean – is over: it has become a farce.

The only duty the present Galway players have is to be as good as they can be, Sunday in and Sunday out. Only then can they begin to think about winning an All-Ireland.

The situation is not so bleak. They are the All-Ireland club champions. They have a once-in-a-lifetime star about to come into his prime. They need to become more defiant. Maybe their senior players need to tell the long-suffering fans – and the heroes of 1988 – where to go. They have lost everything over the past week. Reputation. Respect. The right to be regarded as contenders. Another year.

Perhaps another manager, too. John McIntyre called it straight when other Galway managers were not delivering and he knows the knives will be sharpened now.

He said something interesting in Thurles after watching his team fall apart.

He said Galway needed a root and branch reform to see what has gone wrong over the last 20 years. Honest talking between the clubs and the county board and the players would be a beginning but that kind of change will take years.

It is clear now that to carry on as before is nothing more than a delusion and a waste of everyone’s time. Did the Galway team bus pass that youngster with the flag on the edge of Portumna?

There has never been a braver or lonelier homecoming welcome.