Five hours and not a sniff of a goal? Welcome to the dark net...
IF there is a hype merchant out there who can sell today’s solitary top-flight League game to the public, then he could just as easily sell a glass of water to a drowning man. Tyrone and Galway have already between them almost played five hours of football and have somehow not so much as managed a sniff of a goal.
Tyrone managed to beat Roscommon and Galway eked out a draw against the same opposition in a game so dour that there are fears that copies of it will make its way onto the dark net where it will be purchased by torture specialists in despotic states, to be played on the loop. A man would want a strong stomach not to break.
We jest, but only barely.
Yes, it is early days and the football in the opening two rounds – particularly a fortnight ago – has been undermined by brutal weather conditions that sabotaged good football, or, as in the Galway/Roscommon game, any football.
The games will get better and so will Tyrone and Galway, but how much is the thing?
Galway are now where Tyrone were last year.
The whole country expected a response after the weakest defence of the Sam Maguire in the modern history of the game, we envisaged gnashing of Tyrone teeth and the sight of an angry Red Hand laying everything and everyone to waste.
We did not expect that they would go out of the first round of the Ulster championship, or come within a kick of the ball of being put out of the group stages by Westmeath or be sent packing without laying a hand on Kerry in the AllIreland quarter-final. But that is exactly what happened.
The expectation this year is that it will be Galway who will be the ones driven by a deep hurt, having gone from being perhaps the most likely team to win the Sam Maguire in early summer to not even making the All-Ireland quarter-finals after losing to Armagh and Mayo inside a week.
Anyhow, if hurt is such a powerful energy source it was hardly as if they were wanting on that front last year coming off the back of an All-Ireland final loss to Kerry, in which they felt aggrieved by the concession of a contentious free late in the game.
The more time has passed since Tyrone’s All-Ireland victory and Galway’s All-Ireland loss, the more suspicion grows that motivation and mind-set is not the issue for either but that quality is.
I go back to an old neighbour of mine when I was growing up, a big believer that quality trumped all, who advised, ‘you can’t paint without paint’.
That is not to say that Tyrone are devoid of quality. Darragh Canavan is already establishing himself as one of the best forwards in the game, only perhaps behind David Clifford and Shane McGuigan in that elite bracket. But you look around that Tyrone team and it is getting harder to see who are the leaders who will back him up.
The retirements of Ronan McNamee and Niall Sludden, the return of Conor McKenna to the AFL, the injury issues that have dogged Mattie Donnelly and Cathal McShane, the loss of form that sucked the confidence from the 2021 footballer of the year Kieran McGeary – all topped off by the raft of reserve players who left in the immediate aftermath of that Sam Maguire win – has done much to drain that pool of talent.
Of course, teams evolve and the likes of, in particular, Sean Donnelly, Ciaran Daly and Michael McGleenan will get enough gametime in the coming weeks to stake a place on the team for the championship.
But those young players need to lean on more established players to show the way and outside of Canavan, there is no more than a handful – Niall Morgan, Michael McKernan, Peter Harte, Conor Meyler and Conn Kilpatrick – that can shoulder that kind of weight. And that is simply not enough.
In many ways, Galway’s problems may even be bigger.
Pádraic Joyce might take some comfort – and certainly he does not appear to be perturbed by his team’s early season form that has seen them score just 0-19 over two games – in the knowledge that he has been missing three of his main players in Sean Kelly, Damien Comer and Cillian McDaid.
Of course, any team in the land would suffer in the absence of that trio. Comer is a gifted inside forward and in so many ways the ultimate target man – big powerful, great hands and even better feet – but he is also an unlucky player in that over the past few years he has had to battle hard to be fit.
Kelly is an outrageous talent, in many ways the ultimate hybrid footballer who can play brilliantly in any position. But ever since he sustained that injury against Armagh last June, he has struggled for fitness, failing to line out for Moycullen in the county final.
Sure, it is early in the year but that has got to be a worry. And while no one disputes the class of Shane Walsh, the reason he is ranked a level below Clifford and McGuigan is because he has not developed their levels of consistency. On top of all that, given the importance of the role, there has been a long running issue over the goalkeeping position in Galway which has not gone away.
The bottom line is that Tyrone and Galway have at best stagnated and, at worst, regressed over the past year.
They have gone from being top four teams to top eight ones, and if that does not seem like such a drop, it is a world away from where they both need to be if they are to contend when it matters most.
Tyrone and Galway have gone from being top four teams to top eight ones