A familiar tale of woe for another Sligo team
Liam Maloney laments that the county’s title famine in the Minor Championship continues
COUNTY BOARD SUPPORT: Sligo GAA chairman Sean Carroll was at last Saturday’s decider.
AS THIS group of Sligo teenagers left the field of battle, shattered, sodden and soaked, literally shivering too, their defeat to Roscommon raised several questions.
Why did this particular team have to lose? Why couldn’t their late revival have begun a lot sooner?
Why did the attack underperform? Could manager Daragh Fallon have done things differently? Why did their first-half chances result in zero scores? Could the players have done more? Why this, why that.
No-one could have predicted that Storm Bella would lash the Connacht GAA Centre but, then again, this being late December it was never going to be an evening of hazy sunshine at Costa del Bekan.
Sligo supporters have become so used to post-mortems, digging through the debris of defeat, looking for clues.
Not counting replays, last Saturday’s Connacht GAA Minor Football Championship decider was the county’s 56th provincial final (at Minor, U-20/U-21, Junior and Senior level). The three-point loss to the Rossies, 1-5 to 1-2, which came less than a week after the morale-boosting semi-final defeat of Mayo, was the 40th occasion that a Sligo team was beaten in a Connacht final. Ultimately, Sligo’s litany of losses in all grades comes down to one stark fact: Just not good enough.
Still, even when accepting this harsh reality, there are several factors that often combine to create the perfect storm in the Connacht Minor Football Championship.
Management styles, coaching acumen, available talent, injuries and the strength of Sligo’s club structures/secondary schools. And other things – a slice of luck, the bounce of a ball, a referee’s call. This group of Sligo teens, who clearly didn’t do their best against a decent Roscommon side, were the first to live through a pandemic. It wasn’t just their preparations and season that was turned upside down and inside out, but their entire world as teens growing up in Sligo. Imagine a normal year, this group getting four round-robin games – then their worth would have been properly assessed. Instead, they got four games – two at the start of the year and two at the end – and two of these were ‘preparatory’ fixtures in the Ulster GAA Minor Football League.
Denied the learning curve of the Connacht Minor Football Championship, one with its round-robin series of games, Sligo’s teens got a learning curve – about how to deal with lockdowns, social distancing, how to figure out stuff in a world wearing masks. Still, despite all this, it would have been terrific to see them win against Roscommon and become the first team since the crop of 1968 to win this provincial competition.
In six campaigns, Sligo have contested – and lost – three Connacht Minor Football Championship finals. Consider that the best of this year’s bunch, possibly five or six players, will be 22 in 2025, when members from the excellent Sligo Minor team of 2015, those who have made it at Senior level, will be 28 and still in their prime years.
Therefore, we could see the likes of Dylan Walsh, Canice Mulligan, Dáire O’Boyle and James Kiernan playing alongside Eddie McGuinness, Patrick O’Connor, Seán Carrabine, Liam Gaughan and Mikey Gordon.
Funnily enough, despite losing so many finals at underage level, Sligo have managed to put together reasonable Senior teams. It will be interesting to chart the progress of this year’s U-17 players.
Meanwhile, there was no getting away from references to the weather in any of the online items that covered last Saturday’s decider.
The RTÉ Sport website’s coverage of the final called the conditions “horrendous”. Indeed they were.
But the same report concluded with a reminder to the GAA, saying “late December is not an optimum time for concluding competitions at any level”.
This final was scheduled for last Saturday so that it could be played before the return of Level 5 restrictions. The scheduling wasn’t ideal. The weather wasn’t ideal.
But this year has been far from ideal thanks to Covid-19. Had the final been postponed – again – it could have been April or May before it was staged. And that is assuming that restrictions would have been reduced sufficiently to allow for collective training sessions for at least four weeks before the decider.
Who knows what format next year’s Connacht GAA Minor Football Championship will take. Straight knockout isn’t ideal, given the obvious benefits of the round-robin process, but with Covid-19 still with us, what will be, will be.