Monaghan won’t be facing a Galway team ready to roll over
I DON’T buy the theory that Monaghan will have a big motivational edge on Galway next weekend just because the latter have already reached the last four.
It is all true that Monaghan will be playing for their lives and will leave it all out there while if Galway are to win the All-Ireland they will have to beat Dublin at some stage so why not in a semi-final?
But this is a team which has only lost one game all year and if their season was to end with back-to-back defeats it would take a lot of the shine off their season.
And getting to an All-Ireland final would be a huge milestone for this Galway team, providing them with a huge incentive to take down Dublin when it matters most.
For that reason I expect Galway to win, and salting Monaghan’s wounds I believe Kerry will win by enough to ensure that they slip ahead of the Ulster men on the table.
Meanwhile, inconsistency is the biggest enemy of refereeing standards in our game.
Inside 24 hours we saw two very different standards of officiating last weekend, where I felt David Coldrick facilitated a really intense, tough encounter between Tyrone and Dublin.
The following day a great game of ball broke out despite the best efforts of Maurice Deegan, who called far too may ‘soft’ frees including one that cost Monaghan dearly at the death when he erroneously ruled Colin Walshe to have played the ball on the ground, which led to the passage of play that ended with David Clifford’s goal.
And then, in contrast, if they were still playing Kieran Donaghy would not have earned a free despite being fouled in front of the posts on more than one occasion.
That is just not good enough.