A TRIBE TO BE FEARED
Galway can rival the country’s top sides
FOR the fifth year in a row, the FBD Connacht league will conclude with Galway and Roscommon facing each other in the final.
No matter what transpires in Tuam Stadium tomorrow afternoon, the sense is that the Tribesmen have their sights on loftier goals than a bit of pre-season silverware.
Last year saw Kevin Walsh’s side welcomed to Gaelic football’s top table. Returning to the top-flight after seven years, they were unbeaten in the group stages of the League and even asked a few awkward questions of Dublin in the final before running out of steam in the final quarter.
Still, that was the springboard to set other milestones during the summer. They beat Kerry in the Championship for the first time since 1965 and reached their first All-Ireland semi-final in 17 years. Even though that ended with a whimper against Dublin, it marked the Tribesmen down as a team that are on the rise.
They even caused one or two nervous moments for Jim Gavin in that game — Damien Comer’s goal meant there were questions asked about the Dublin full-back line’s ability to deal with the high ball. However, Galway didn’t send enough missiles down on top of them when they were on top in that first half.
‘We probably played well in the first half and Dublin didn’t play as well as they normally would,’ Galway playmaker Shane Walsh recalled during the week. ‘We had a lot of chances and didn’t take them. That’s being realistic about it. It wasn’t good enough from our perspective, hitting one out of four or five chances whereas Dublin were hitting nine out of 10 chances. They scored 1-8 from their 10 chances in the first half.
‘That’s the level they’ve been operating at and it’s another area we have to catch up with them in. Dublin got their purple patch in the third quarter of the game, just three or four points of a margin, and went to seven or eight points, they’re that good of a team,’ Walsh said of the team going for five-in-a-row this year.
‘I think everyone would reflect and say they’d always like to change things when you don’t end up with the prize at the end of the day. For us, to get to where we got to, we exceeded expectations really. Nobody expected us to go through the League unbeaten and to be in the League final, to get to an All-Ireland semi-final, it was brilliant for us because the group had never been there before.’
And Walsh felt that the team benefited from not looking too far down the road in 2018. ‘That was the big thing for us on last year, to play every game as we saw it and see where it brings us to. We kind of hit new ground as we were going along. We were probably the favourites to get relegated from Division 1, then going through like we did was probably unknown to all of us and we kind of only realised what happened when the year was over.’
If they exceeded expectations last year, everyone will be wary of the Tribesmen in 2019.
They now have a solid base on which to build an All-Ireland challenge, even if some familiar faces have left the dressing-room. Veteran forward Sean Armstrong announced his retirement in the winter while the Sweeney twins, Cathal and Patrick, have opted out of the squad for the year.
However, those losses have been off-set by midfielder Fiontán Ó Curraoin’s return while Kevin Walsh will also be able to call upon former AFL hopeful Cillian McDaid. And captain Paul Conroy, who got married during the winter, is on the road to recovery from the broken leg he suffered in the Super 8 win over Kerry.
‘Paul likes to have a good time. I don’t know how long he has been away on honeymoon but I was at the wedding and it feels like two months ago. I still haven’t seen him,’ Walsh says of his skipper. ‘He’s making progress but he won’t be rushed back, not with an injury of that significance.
‘They will be trying to make sure he is 100 percent right before he gets back on the field. It could be the middle of the League before we see him. But Paul has been in the panel since 2007 and when someone like that who is in the middle of everything is missing, you are going to feel that loss.
‘But we still had options to go to. We didn’t have fellas in makeshift positions. We still had players of top quality. Peter Cooke came in against Kerry after Paul got injured and he was brilliant in the middle of the field with Tom (Flynn). We’ve Fiontán (Ó Curraoin) back as well, which is a huge addition. Imagine with a whole pre-season behind him what he’s going to add and that’s another option around the middle.’
Yet another option for a team who seem on the rise, regardless of what happens in Tuam tomorrow.