Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Corofin style is all well & good at club level.. but not here
GARY DEFENDS TRIBE APPROACH
GALWAY’S Gary O’donnell says the Corofin template simply doesn’t fit at county level.
The perennial Galway county champions stormed to the All-ireland club title once again this year with another eye-catching display against Dr Crokes in the final, 12 months after they had dismantled Nemo Rangers in similar fashion.
Their brand of football is widely celebrated while the county team, despite emerging as one of the top sides in the game, is often derided for being too defensive.
“It’s often mentioned,” says O’donnell of the contrast with Corofin. “It’s a completely different level of football.
“The Corofin players themselves will tell you that, Gary Sice mentioned it recently. The standard is different. But at the same time whatever style they play, I think we play it as well at times, maybe not as consistently as we always do, depends on who you are playing and so on.
“I think club football allows for a lot of that kind of football as well, there are very little opportunities for teams to pack defences because the game would be over after 20 minutes if that was the case. So it allows them to do that, and credit it to them,” said the Tuam Stars man at AIB’S AllIreland SFC launch.
O’donnell insists Galway had to be pragmatic in order to make their way back into the footballing elite having gone eight years without a Connacht title up to 2016 while labouring in Division Two.
“Sometimes people look at Galway, one of the traditional counties, playing a lovely brand of football and so on, but you cut your cloth to measure sometimes, and we came from an area way down the pecking order.. so we had too progress as best we could.
“Kevin [Walsh] has come in, and we’ve ticked a lot of boxes along the way. At the same time it’s a results business, we made the All-ireland semifinal for the first time last summer after a long time, and the main aim is to get there again and learn from our lessons from last year.
“If you ask people about style of play or results, a player will tell you all day they want to win games.
“Sometimes you might have to sacrifice the spectacle of a game or whatever it is, we don’t go out intentionally to play in any way negative at all.”