Mannion won’t get caught up in Hurler of the Year conjecture
PÁDRAIC MANNION insists that he hasn’t given a second thought to the prospect of being named Hurler of the Year this evening. The Galway defender is simply looking forward to donning the tuxedo and mingling with players from other counties at the PWC AllStar ceremony in Dublin’s convention centre. Had the season ended after the All-Ireland semi-finals, Mannion would be clear favourite to be named the player of the summer. Many feel that he was still the best hurler in the country during 2018, although Limerick’s Cian Lynch, by virtue of their emotional All-Ireland win, may just get the nod. And Mannion gives the impression that if he misses out, it won’t overly bother him. ‘To be honest, I haven’t put much thought into it,’ the defender claimed in the Australian embassy yesterday, where he and Cillian Buckley launched the Wild Geese trophy match between Galway and Kilkenny to be played in Sydney on November 11, ‘It is the opinions of other people. I am sure if it was just Galway people voting there would be a bias and it would be the same with Limerick. It is down to the players, whom they feel is worthy of it. Obviously, it’s something you would be very proud of looking back but it is not something to worry too much about.’ Mannion was a model of consistency in a Galway side that stuttered through a lot of the summer, but he reckons that he played just as well the previous summer. ‘I felt that I was consistent last year, too. This year with more games, it gives more time for players to be in the limelight and to prove themselves. But there are games you might get man of the match, you would look back and think you made a lot of mistakes. And there are games when you get criticism that you thought you played well. It depends on what you judge yourself off.’ The common consensus is that Galway never fully sparked during their All-Ireland title defence, but Mannion takes issue with that, pointing out that they retained their Leinster crown and came within a point of forcing a replay in the final. ‘There were an awful lot of positives from the year. It is not as if it was a disaster. We just fell short in the final.’ Replays against Kilkenny in the Leinster decider and Clare in the AllIreland semi-final seemed to sap even more energy from the Galway side, but Mannion refuses to speculate whether the Tribesmen would have won back-to-back AllIrelands without two extra games. ‘Who knows?’ he shrugged. ‘It is hard to know. You don’t want to be making excuses. I don’t want to sit here and say if we didn’t have those replays, we would have won the final.’ With goalkeeper Colm Callanan, who struggled with injury all year, expected to return, Micheál Donoghue is likely to have the same squad to select from. But one theory is that the Galway boss is too dependant on the same 14 or 15 players. Mannion doesn’t agree, though. ‘Our panel was freshened up a good bit. There were a good few new names brought into the panel. It was just the way it worked out that the majority of the team was the same. But there were different faces in the panel, different faces at training and I suppose it is up to everyone in the panel to step it up.’ Mannion, a maths and science teacher at St Cuan’s College, flies out to Australia on Monday morning as he has some promotional work to do ahead of the hurling match, which will be the centre-piece of Sydney’s Irish festival next week. Maybe, someone in the GAA has done an early count of the votes for Player of the Year.