Damien Hayes was a loyal soldier for Galway hurling. He holds the record for appearances in a maroon shirt. He was the kind of player Galway could have used in those defining fifteen minutes of last year's All-Ireland final, when Kilkenny began to twist the knife.
Instead, famously, Galway meekly surrendered their big halftime lead and Cody had his 11th Liam MacCarthy sewn up with enough time to ponder beef or salmon for victory dinner from the sidelines.
The question of what the hell happened to Galway between the time they entered and left the bowels of Croke Park on the afternoon 6 September 2015, specifically between the time of 15.40 and 16.00 has vexed Galway hurling supporters and amateur sleuths for the last six months. Popular theories include a halftime heave against Anthony Cunningham by a substituted player and the unannounced arrival of a player's unhappy father in the dressing room. These are merely theories, though. Unless Croke Park releases cctv footage inside or outside the Galway dressing room, its perhaps safest to simply presume Galway bottled the match in their time-honured bottling tradition.
Damien Hayes has offered his theory on why Galway fell apart so badly last September in today's Indo. In doing so, he has confirmed that something happened in the Galway dressing room, but he won't confirm what exactly.
It was whatever happened in the dressing-room at half-time and that is the truth. It was hugely disappointing. We just....they went missing, Galway went missing in the second half and it's a huge regret for everyone," he says.
The vagueness of Hayes's statement is frustrating, to say the least. What happened in the Galway dressing room that September afternoon is the Irish sports equivalent of the JFK assassination. There are thousands of theories but no cast-iron facts. Perhaps in 100 years, when all the relevent parties are long in the ground, Paraic Duffy's successor can unseal the sworn testimonies of Cunningham, Collins, Canning, Harte et al. so that future generations of crestfallen Galway supporters can understand what happened that afternoon.
Hayes, the Portumna man, surely knows exactly what happened. Hopefully someday we will too.
