Tribe place their trust in one of their own legends
With Kevin Walsh at the helm, Galway are confident of defending their title
KEVIN WALSH is the last Galwayman to win a football All-Star. Contained within that fact is the story of the county’s long decline. The statistic tells a good deal, too, about Walsh, the man leading his people back towards a status in the game that was beyond them for too long.
It is 14 years since a Galway player has been judged one of the best 15 footballers in Ireland, and too many of those seasons were taken up with recrimination and regret.
If slipping from the wonderful peaks of the late 1990s and early 2000s was inevitable, the tumble into the thickets of mediocrity was not.
As that great Galway team declined, Tyrone and Kerry emerged as football’s governing forces. The succeeding generation in the county could not compete with Mayo, and spent summer after summer cast into the qualifiers, each one ending in disappointment.
Like Cavan and Meath before them, Galway appeared another kingdom to be left cobwebbed as the game powered on beyond them.
In winning the Connacht championship last year under Walsh, Galway stopped Mayo winning six provincial titles in a row.
That they did it under one of the most inspiring and influential players to ever wear maroon enriched the symbolism: Walsh and Galway declared ‘Enough’.
They were lost and now they were found.
Walsh had to watch as his team subsequently came apart in an AllIreland quarter-final against Tipperary, but in his third season in charge, Galway are undoubtedly improving. Promotion to Division 1 this past spring was accompanied by a trophy when they won the Division 2 final against Kildare.
Today’s match in Salthill has the cut of a decisive test for Mayo, with their jumbled league form indicating that any improvement this summer will have to come from their existing, wrung-out resources.
But it is as important for Galway. They were humiliated in Pearse Stadium during Mayo’s years of plenty – they lost by 17 points there in 2013 – and righting a wrong like that spices the more basic need to prove they are back by beating their oldest rivals.
‘It’s important to win every game we can. Is the pressure as big as last year? It’s probably not as big as last year in certain aspects and then the other side is we’re probably expecting a bit more,’ says Walsh.
‘We have got promotion and we were eyeing that up from a bit out, albeit the Under 21 (final, where Galway lost to Dublin) came in the middle of it and Corofin went on longer (in the club championship) and may have affected us a bit.
‘The Connacht title is a big one,’ he acknowledges. ‘It would be lovely to retain it but things can go against you.’
In him they trust. Ask people who captained the Galway teams that won Sam Maguire in 1998 and 2001 and many instinctively reach for Walsh’s name. Ray Silke led them to the first of those wins, and Gary Fahey was captain three years later.
There was in Walsh’s demeanour, though, a powerful sense of leadership. It derived partly from his size: standing over 6ft 4ins tall, he was a classic ball-winning centre-field man of the old style.
He won the third of his All-Stars in 2003. He was 34 then, and in the closing years of a glorious if improbable twilight.
After a decade of inter-county football brought him only a solitary Connacht title and two ruined knees, Walsh was 28 when John O’Mahony was appointed Galway manager in the winter of 1997.
‘He had a lot of injury problems but at the same time I knew of his worth. He was one of the first people I contacted,’ recalls O’Mahony now.
‘I wanted him involved. He proved a great leader in the dressing room and on the field. He won his first All-Ireland at 29, and he was entering the veteran stage of his career, but he really took to it.’
Because of his knee problems, Walsh’s training and preparation were necessarily curtailed on occasion, and to help him keep his sharpness O’Mahony recalls the management putting him on the fad Nutron diet, popular with Irishmen trying to get trim in the 1990s. Its devotees were said to include Daniel O’Donnell and Brian Cowen.
It worked for Walsh. He was magnificent in 1998, and a story from the minutes before throw-in of that year’s final speaks to his authoritative presence but also a razor-wire sense of humour.
John Bannon was the referee and was ready to toss the coin. ‘Are you the captain today, Kevin?’ asked Bannon. ‘No, but I should be,’ came the reply.
Walsh is from Killanin, a parish on the edge of Connemara. He was big and talented from a young age, playing senior football with his club from his early teens and representing Ireland in basketball.
By the time he did his Leaving Cert, there was talk of scholarship offers from US colleges. ‘I was a bit of a home-bird,’ he would later recall. ‘At the time I’d been playing senior football at home since I was 13. I loved those parish games and local games more than anything else. I’d a fierce grá for it.’
It helped that he was very, very good. He won an All-Ireland minor medal in 1986 when he was 17. An older brother, Bosco, also featured in that win.
His knee difficulties, which would persist throughout his career and result in multiple surgeries, compromised him during the 1990s as Galway struggled to emerge from a lull then too. He won his first Connacht title in 1995, the county’s first in eight years.
Everything changed when O’Mahony took over, and encouraging Walsh to stay involved was crucial. There are Galway fans who still insist he should have started the drawn final against Kerry in 2000. Instead, he was introduced after less than 20 minutes and played brilliantly, but was forced out of the replay with another knee injury, again with less than 20 minutes elapsed.
He rebounded the following year to star once more, and would soldier on until 2005. There followed five years in charge of Sligo, which featured two Championship wins against his native county and one against Mayo.
He stayed a season too long, with Sligo relegated to Division 4 in 2013 and they then lost in the Championship to London.
Nothing could harm his candidacy to eventually lead his own in the eyes of the faithful. There was little enough to nurse Galway football folk through the mean years, but the eventual return of Walsh was anticipated like a sign in the sky.
They are now defending Connacht champions, with a young team who know what it is to win but who also know, thanks to the loss to Tipperary last August, what it is to fail to meet public expectations.
‘You can have a bad day out which we had last year and if you do it’s how you reset as a team,’ he reckons.
‘It’s important you develop as a team so that if you do get a hit along the way, if you have higher aspirations you learn how to deal with that.’
Thousands will squeeze patiently through the toothpaste-thick crowds in Salthill this afternoon.
They have great ambitions for their men because, in Walsh, they will always trust.