Galway rarely leave the championship quietly. There’s usually some kind of a racket. Expectations are at the root of it. People look at Galway and think we should be winning more. That was true in my career and when I was watching Galway growing up and it’s not going to change.
Like those players last Sunday, anybody who has played for Galway has endured stuff that was hard to swallow. In my first season we were beaten by a Cork team that was reduced to 14 men before half-time. That was it: gone. My last season was in 2021, during Covid, when hurling reverted to a backdoor system: Dublin beat us in Leinster, Waterford beat us in the qualifiers. Two games. Gone.
I played 14 seasons for Galway and 13 of them ended in defeat. In most of those losing years we were regarded as contenders for the All-Ireland. That expectation is the damning part. It makes the bad years worse.
Henry Shefflin came to Galway to win the All-Ireland. Everybody understood that. In his first season they took Limerick down the stretch in an All-Ireland semi-final; in his second season they rattled Limerick for 25 minutes. This year, they failed to produce one performance that made them look like contenders.
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In the Leinster round-robin you must perform against Kilkenny, Wexford and Dublin. You will probably get away with playing well against two of them. This year Galway failed to perform against all of them.
The current championship structure is unforgiving in many ways but it also gives teams a chance to recover from one bad day. Wexford have done it this year and so have Cork. I expected that kind of response from Galway after the Kilkenny game but instead Galway went backwards against Wexford. Losing in Wexford Park, against 14 men for the last quarter, was probably the turning point.
At no stage did they look like a team going somewhere: gaining momentum, improving, growing. They looked stuck. Unsure of how they wanted to play, unsure of their identity, unsure of themselves.
When something like that happens the management will naturally get stick. In my view, most of the responsibility lies with the players. At least 70:30. When you cross the white line nobody else can do it for you.
I don’t know what was going on in training. I don’t know how well they thought they were going. They could have been flying. The bottom line is that you must produce it on the days that matter and Galway didn’t do that.
There’s been a lot of speculation about Shefflin’s future this week. Last autumn, before his three year term was up, he agreed an extension to take him beyond this season. But at that stage Galway still looked like a team that could mount a serious challenge for the All-Ireland whereas now Galway are facing into a period of rebuilding.
Is that what Shefflin signed up for? Not when he agreed to come on board in 2021 and not when he agreed to an extension nine months ago.
I would like to see him give it another year. I still think his relationship with Eamon O’Shea has a lot to offer. For whatever reason we didn’t see the fruits of it this season. Maybe they just didn’t have enough time. The championship starts at the end of April these days and the weather was so bad for the first few months of the year that it must have impacted on every county’s preparation.
For a team that was working with a new coach and potentially changing their style, they would have needed a lot of quality time on the pitch and that wasn’t available to anybody.
Galway have been trying to get O’Shea on board for a long time and it wouldn’t be good to lose him after just one season. I did a session with him once in Pearse Stadium, one-on-one. He had a good relationship with Micheál Donoghue and when Micheál was Galway manager he thought it would be beneficial for me to meet him and work through some stuff about movement.
As a person and as a coach, O’Shea has a really big presence and it’s easy to see how he could influence a group of players if their minds were open to his ideas. Galway really need him to stay.
The reality, though, is that there are no quick fixes here. Whoever takes on the rebuilding project will be laying a foundation for the next manager. Nobody will see Galway as contenders next year.
I imagine that some players will retire – at least a couple. I played with a lot of the lads who are coming towards the end of their careers. I wouldn’t dream of asking them what their plans are but I hope they take their time. Whatever team takes the field next year, Galway will still need experienced players.
People wonder what happened to the four-in-a-row minor teams that won All-Irelands between 2017 and 2020. The reality is that plenty of those players are on the senior panel now but very few of them are making the team. There has been a holdup in that process somewhere. Nobody makes a jump from minor to senior any more and going from under-20 to senior is a waiting game too.
Athletic development is absolutely critical. Going back the years did all the young players have that foundation? I don’t think so. Lukas Kirszenstein was in charge of strength and conditioning for all Galway hurling teams for a number of years but I know when Jeff Lynskey was manager at minor and under-20 level he wasn’t following Lukas’ strength and conditioning programmes. Those programmes would have been designed to help the younger players make the jump to senior in time.
For everyone who cares about Galway hurling it has been a tough week. Six weeks ago, even a month ago, Galway were seen as contenders for the All-Ireland. How long before we can say that again?
