It has been the year of the velvet revolution. Galway football, easy-going and pretty to the point that we generally mistrust it, has insistently asserted the worth of its own traditional values. From Corofin's spiritually nourishing coup in March, to Galway’s lovely uprising yesterday, the weedy certainties of modern football have been uprooted and discarded.
So wrote Tom Humphries in 1998.
How low can Galway football go? We keep on waiting for their fortunes to turn, for the cyclical nature of things to re-assert itself. Galway have been down for long enough. They’re too big a footballing county with too rich a history to be this bad for this long.
However, sometimes the cycle doesn’t turn. Sometimes teams stay down indefinitely. Cavan haven’t come close to winning too many All-Irelands since 1952. Wexford had a rather long period in the wilderness after 1918.
Galway football has never quite plugged in, in the post puke football era. They have been behind the curve the whole time. With every new manager, you hear the same debate about whether Galway should stick to their traditional, free-flowing, attacking game or whether they should embrace the modern precepts of getting men behind the ball and defending in packs. On bad days in the Championship, Galway haven’t been playing attacking football or defensive football, they’ve just been playing losing football. Sloppy football. The word ‘abject’ could have been invented to describe Galway’s run in the last decade.
Between 2006 and 2013 they mastered the ability of manufacturing a one point loss out of pretty much any situation no matter how promising. Galway’s ability to scramble out of any endgame with a one-point deficit intact was unrivalled.
This is something Martin Breheny, a Galway man and a trenchant critic of the current Galway generation, has written about in the Irish Independent roughly every fortnight. In those eight seasons, they have lost ten championship games by a point. This is obviously the most intense period of single point losses in Championship history, these kind of numbers being a statistical impossibility until recently. They have lost Championship games by a point to opponents as varied as Westmeath and Antrim, Cork and Mayo.
However, in this League campaign so far, it looks like the ability to go down by a point now eludes them. They’d do anything to go back to those days now, you’d suspect. A 1-20 to 0-8 defeat in Laois forced the Galway county board to announce they had full confidence in Alan Mulholland. It’s very early in the season to be voting confidence in the manager. They have conceded a whopping 5-54 in three matches.
Last year, Galway looked fragile enough that they were capable of losing to just about anybody. For 20 terrifying minutes in the second half, it looked like they were going to lose to Waterford in Salthill. A resurgent and surprising victory against Armagh and an energetic and attractive display against Cork left supporters with a tentative feeling of optimism. However, that has been doused by the dreadful opening to the League campaign.
Ray Silke warned on Tuesday about “apathy” setting in among the supporters. In Galway, it’s a very real concern. In 1994, when Galway gained a draw against Leitrim, roughly 200 supporters made the arduous trip from wherever they lived in Galway to Carrick-on-Shannon. 200. When Galway snatched an unexpected draw against Mayo in Tuam in 1992 (Ja Fallon scoring the last minute equaliser on his Championship debut), the away supporters outnumbered the home fans by two to one.
When Mayo, the most fevered and obsessive race of supporters, were dumped out of the Championship in a First Round qualifier by Longford in 2010, they brought thousands of supporters down to Pearse Park, almost packing the place out. Had Galway arrived down to play a match in similar circumstances, its touch and go whether they would have had more than 100 people following them. When Galway are going through bad periods, it can seem like the county doesn’t even have a football team.
Galway have been here before, and not that long ago either. You don’t have to go back to ancient history. In the early 90s, Galway were arguably the worst team in unarguably the worst province in the country. (The Mayo team of 1993, for instance, have a decent claim to being the worst provincial champions of all time. See here and here).
Between 1991 and 1994, Galway won one championship match, against London. In 1991, they were beaten on a chastening scoreline of 3-11 to 0-6 in the first round in Castlebar, an inauspicious beginning to the career of Sean Og De Paor. In 1993 and 94, they were beaten by a point by Leitrim (usually highlighted as the low point by Galway fans but at that point Leitrim were probably the best team in Connacht.)
Within a few years, Galway were All-Ireland champions. If Galway were an international football team (a popular parlour game this among Irish sporting obsessives) they would be France, with their phlegmatic fanbase and their ability to veer wildly between the dazzlingly brilliant and jaw-droppingly, ‘oh-my-god, how are you so bad?’ useless in a bewilderingly short space of time. And, of course, they had a good year in 1998.
By 1998, all was well. Galway cut a serious dash that summer leaving all the purists purring in a manner only Galway, Kerry and perhaps Down have been able to do. That year’s All-Ireland final, like almost every major Galway win, was hailed as the renaissance of football itself.
Three years later, they would cruise to another All-Ireland. Having limped into that years All-Ireland final, losing to Roscommon in Tuam, ekeing past Armagh and Cork in mid-summer qualifiers in echoey, half full Croke Parks and then beating in Derry in a final quarter smash and grab in the semi-final. Question marks hung over every win. Each victory brought its own misgivings.
By contrast, their opponents in that year’s final, Meath, enjoyed (a bit too much) an almost blasphemously easy win over Kerry in the semi-final. 2-14 to 0-5 was the astonishing scoreline. Perhaps mythologising later on, Sean Boylan would say that he feared the worst for the final when the Meath crowd began cheering every five yard fist pass at the end of the semi-final. The Meath supporters practically conga-danced their way into Croke Park for that year’s All-Ireland final.
The final was a complete repudiation of everything that had gone before. On a blindingly sunny Indian Summer day, Galway tore through tired, jaded Meath side in the, sweeping them aside in a definitive, anti-climactic fashion. The westerners sauntered to victory in the final quarter in such a way that the celebrations had a low key feel relative to the delerium of three years before. It was a swaggering performance with Kevin Walsh destroying the Meath midfield and Padraig Joyce lobbing over 10 points, most of them from play
It's arguable that the late O’Mahony era was where the rot set in. Galway seemed to be a satisfied footballing county. With Mayo, under Pat Holmes, in a bit of a slumber, a listless enough Galway claimed couple of sleepy Connacht wins in 2002 and 2003 that excited no one in particular. These were followed by fairly abject defeats in All-Ireland quarter finals to Kerry and Donegal. When Mayo burst out again in 2004, under the returning John Maughan. Galway were blown away in Castlebar despite scoring a rocket of a goal in the first ten seconds. Ciaran McDonald gave a characteristically stylish display at centre forward and a month later O’Mahony was gone.
Whenever supporters ponder this kind of inexplicable decline there are a range of responses. The kneejerk ones usually point the finger of blame at the guy in the managerial chair. Like his predecessor and his predecessor’s predecessor the problem begins and ends with him. This was formerly popular among England football supporters and, to be fair, very few Galway fans are convinced by it. The more ostensibly thoughtful ones point to (usually unspecified) mistakes made at County Board level down the years. This explanation, a scattergun scapegoating of the suits in officialdom, is particularly popular among Galway fans at the moment and is always popular among Irish soccer fans who like to berate the FAI for more or less everything. It seems like one is taking the long view and eschewing the lowbrow option of pinning the blame on the manager when one plumps for this explanation. The one favoured by Ray Silke, however, is simply that the talent isn't there and the standard of club football is weak.
Yet, Galway’s recent run is in spite of a (perhaps superficially) healthy enough record at underage level. Galway have won four U-21 All-Irelands since their last senior title (2002, 2005, 2011 and 2013) and one All-Ireland minor title in 2007. Mulholland loaded the team with graduates from the 2011 and 2013 u-21 teams on Saturday as he did in last year’s scarring Connacht first round tie against Mayo.
Galway's underage record comes with a health warning however. Galway might have won four U-21 All-Irelands in 12 years, but what is their record in Connacht in that time? 4 titles. This is compared to Mayo's six provincial titles at that level in the same period. Given that there is no back-door at U-21 level, this essentially means that every time the Galway U-21s won Connacht, they went on to win the All-Ireland (Like the Down Seniors 1960-1994). Mayo have also dominated the province at minor level in recent times. Mayo football seems to have more urgency and intensity about than Galway football for the past decade. To make matters worse, St. Jarlath's, long time behemoths of football at Hogan Cup level, are no longer hoovering up titles and were defeated by St. Attracta's of Sligo last week.
Time is running out for the 2002 and 2005 generation to have a say in the All-Ireland series, and what makes anyone think the youngsters of 2011 and 2013 will have any more luck at senior level? The first few rounds of the League indicate that Galway football’s years in the wilderness show no sign of coming to an end.
