Kevin Walsh has established himself as the foremost critic of the critics working in management at the moment.
Even going back to his playing days, Walsh was always fond of telling the punditcrocy they were talking out of their backsides after a Galway victory. By all accounts, he thoroughly enjoyed doing so after the 2001 All-Ireland final when Galway were made biggish outsiders against a Meath team who crushed Kerry in the semi-final.
After years and years of mystifying slumber, there is a growing body of evidence to suggest that Walsh is steadily transforming Galway into a county capable of living with the big boys in the top 4.
Prior to the Mayo game this season, the doom-mongering in Galway reached stratospheric levels, with the news that a ludicrous number of county eligible players had opted out of the panel.
Not only were Galway not fancied to beat Mayo, they were less fancied than they had been in any of past five years, when they'd been taking regular pastings.
After the shock win, Kevin was asked about the coverage.
It can be motivation. It's either poor journalism or probably something that people don't really know too much about. Lookit, we'll let them off. They're entitled to have their few pints. It's a bit disrespectful, in fairness. We probably deserved a mention last week but didn't get it. But that's okay, we'll get it tonight.
After Galway ran riot against Roscommon in the Connacht Final replay in Castlebar yesterday, Walsh decided that the journalistic community needed another blast of something.
As recorded by Sean Moran in the Irish Times today.
Unfortunately for the players and management you’re analysed to death by everybody who has time to do that. Unfortunately in your own profession you don’t get analysed as much as we do - even those up in the studio don’t. It’s fine to throw stuff out there and if we have a bad day out we’ve no choice but to go back to the drawing board.
Maybe in journalism if you’re badly out, maybe let someone else come in and take the piece for next week and you go back to something else. You’re not analysed as much as we are. We’ve no choice but to put the heads down and make things better.
On Off the Ball this evening, he insisted that he didn't read the article in which Jim McGuinness said the Connacht final was but the harbinger for the end of days in Gaelic football.
I don't know how long or how short it is. We're really only interested in what we're doing ourselves. We will change up things as we feel we are required to do that and if it works we're very happy. If it doesn't work, we'll go again.
We did suggest last year, after a couple of the more dubious 'ye wrote us off, ye c***s' claims, that players and managers should be required to cite the exact article, the publication, as well the publication date when making such claims in the future. Kevin Walsh is much too scary to be made subject to such rules. Either way, his comments when his team is written off have a broad ring of truth to them.
We could speculate that his antipathy to the punditry game relates back to Sligo's 2013 championship loss in London.
