LONG WAIT TO RE-JOYCE
Galway’s progress under their old hero is checked for now
PADRAIC JOYCE delivers. He was one of the outstanding forwards of his generation, a period that featured both Maurice Fitzgerald and Peter Canavan.
Joyce was comfortably accommodated in that elite rank.
He played with his collar up in a time when such a gesture was viewed with suspicion, perhaps a sign of a maverick spirit.
Yet Joyce delivered. He kept the collar up and the goals and points coming.
On a truly wonderful Galway side, he was the scintillating punctuation point. He played the game with an attitude that made defenders that little keener to do some damage, but Joyce was tough and able to endure even the most invasive attention. He was no shaper, but a winner. That was maybe too easily overlooked when word emerged of an interview he had given to Galway Bay FM last November.
It was only a matter of weeks since he had been chosen to succeed his old team-mate, Kevin Walsh.
The latter had five years in the role and made Galway the best team in Connacht. They were unable to cross the divide to Dublin, though, reaching an All-Ireland semi-final and finding themselves emphatically dismissed by the champions two years ago.
The style of football employed by Walsh was often rudimentary, even as forwards of significant quality like Damien Comer and Shane Walsh broke into the senior team.
Walsh himself never seemed much concerned with niceties or diplomacy in his media dealings. While this matters a lot less than journalists presume, when a manager struggles repeatedly to push his players on to the next level, it can add to the impression of a group in stasis.
And so much of the good done by Walsh was absorbed into a general impression of a hardworking unit that were slaves to a system not getting the best out of them.
By the end of last season – one in which Galway lost the Connacht final to Roscommon and were then beaten by Mayo in a riveting round-four qualifier in Limerick – the appetite for change was ravenous.
Joyce had spent a year in charge of the county’s Under 20 team, but it was the enormous reputation he earned as a player that made him the outstanding candidate to replace Walsh.
As if hopes of a more expansive style of football were not sent soaring by the simple fact of his appointment, Joyce then told Galway Bay what he thought would make for a good first year in the role.
‘A successful year one would be to start off by winning the FBD league, go on and win the national league, and then win the All-Ireland. That is our aim,’ he said simply. That is what we are aiming for straightaway.
‘That might sound far-fetched to a lot of people. I am not saying we are going to win the All-Ireland in two years’ time or three years or we are training for two years’ time. We are training for August 30 next year. That is when the All-Ireland final is on.
‘If we don’t do that, I will see it as disappointment.’
It was invigorating to hear a manager refuse to give himself hiding places, but Joyce’s moxie was still remarkable.
Even more surprising was the fact that he was meeting the early targets in his plan.
Galway won the FBD league, but no managerial career will stand or fall on results in a pre-season competition.
It was the team’s brilliant start to Division One of the league that was starting to make his bullish ambition seem plausible.
When the competition was suspended after five rounds, Galway headed Division One by a point from Kerry.
They had won four of their five matches, including wins away to Donegal and Meath, and they had lost to Kerry in Tralee by only a point.
Three of their four wins were by a solitary point, too. That could be evidence of luck, but when it happens three times in a month, there is more than chance at play.
This is a group with gravel in their guts.
And that, as much as the vibrant football they were playing, saw them materialise as prospective contenders in 2020.
And it is why their supporters have more reason than practically any other county – with the exception of Dublin fans anticipating six in a row – to be frustrated at the sporting carnage wrought by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Even in their low times, the grim years that followed their last All-Ireland win in 2001 and the emergence of Mayo as consistent contenders for the Sam Maguire, Galway never quaked at the prospect of facing any of their provincial rivals.
In fact the refusal of Galway football people to take a step back when confronting any opposition, or to consider themselves inferior
“Success would
be us winning the All-Ireland”
no matter how wretched their state or how good the side about to face them, is one of the ageless truths of Irish sport.
This is not a tribe that does inferiority – and the way 2020 was starting to take shape, that unalterable confidence was becoming justified.
The game Galway was playing had a classical tinge to it through February. Joyce, unsurprisingly, eschewed the mass defence relied upon by Walsh.
Instead, his team were shifting the ball forwards at speed, with diagonal kicks into the attackers a feature.
In Walsh, Joyce has the ideal fulcrum for such a game. He is prodigiously talented, a two-footed, elusive presence in the mould of classical playmakers like Declan O’Sullivan or Joyce’s old team-mate and one of the gods of Galway football, Ja Fallon.
Their penultimate league match was the astonishing rout of Tyrone in Tuam, the home team winning by 19 points on the day Cathal McShane got seriously injured.
The manner in which Galway cut loose when Tyrone started to wilt befitted a leading team, and they displayed a ruthlessness and an economy in attack that any side hoping to beat Dublin must possess.
What will be even more frustrating was the prospect of relegating Mayo in round six, and then playing Dublin in the final series of league matches.
Beating their oldest rivals would not have relegated them on its own, but results elsewhere could have made that fate unavoidable.
Then, meeting Dublin in Salthill would have given Joyce the chance to measure his side against the most exacting standard the sport has ever known.
Now, though, it seems very unlikely that the league will be finished at all, with John Horan’s comments last weekend indicating as much.
And a championship, of any type, being played in 2020 is not a convincing scenario, either.
Galway are young enough to come again in 2021 if the year is wiped out.
Joyce, the players and their supporters are entitled to feel frustrated nonetheless.
They were starting to look a serious part of the year’s considerations.
Keeping that flame dancing through the barren months to come is now the requirement.