GER FARRAGHER INTERVIEW:SO MANY dead-ball merchants, in so many sports, cite the English World Cup winner Jonny Wilkinson as their guiding light. Ger Farragher is no different.

We suspect he was at the Sportsground last Friday evening to see Toulon’s outhalf in the flesh as Wilkinson guided the French club to victory over Connacht in the Amlin Challenge Cup semi-final.

Like Wilkinson, Farragher is a slave to the loneliness of the back field when others have long showered and gone off for a feed.

“All the way up along,” says Farragher, when asked about his free-taking sessions.

“I was reading a book there on Jonny Wilkinson. His practice makes perfect. He always knows going up to take a kick that he is going to score. It is all positive thinking really.”

Farragher made such an impression during the National League that John McIntyre left him as Galway’s chief striker even when Joe Canning returned from Portumna.

“Joe would be taking the 21s and the sidelines on the right-hand side and I’d be taking them on the left. It doesn’t matter. At the end of the day if you are not scoring them you are going to leave them aside to him and if he is not scoring them I’d be taking them.”

This is a prime example of what the league has borne out: Galway have stopped making excuses and started taking responsibility for their own actions.

Now 27, a carpenter by trade, Farragher was in Dublin yesterday to receive Vodafone’s April player of the month award having tapped back into the consistency levels that saw him become an All Star in 2005.

He would be forgiven for blaming Ger Loughnane for stalling his intercounty career, but, instead, he gives the Clare maestro credit for laying the strength and conditioning foundations now clearly evident in Galway.

“It started with Ger Loughnane, he’s the first lad that got us into the gym and we’ve just continued the work that he started doing with us. It doesn’t happen overnight, it’s going to take a year or two to build up your strength, they say.

“Another big thing we’ve worked on is concentration, particularly in the last five, 10 minutes of a game when we’ve let teams come back into it. We didn’t let that happen the last day and maybe that’s the result, hopefully it is. If we keep doing that it should be a good year for us.

“There’s more of a team spirit there than any other year. We went away to Westport (four weeks ago) and had a great bonding weekend and things like that help.”

Currently operating in his old midfield slot, after McIntyre simply asked him where he would like to play, his current form begs the question, what really happened under Loughnane?

“I was training away but I had a bit of a back injury at the time and I fell out of favour. And performances as well. I probably wasn’t hurling as well as I could. Different management have different opinions. Some lad’s favourite one day wouldn’t be another lad’s favourite the next day.”

He takes responsibility for his own actions especially when Waterford’s surprise victory last summer is raised.

“We’re long enough now threatening to do it. Every year it’s the same, ‘it’s going to be Galway’s year this year’ or whatever but it’s about time the players stood up now and said it.

“Last year we threw it away ourselves, we should have beaten Waterford, we just threw it away in the last few minutes. We were four points up in injury-time or something, hopefully we’ll learn from it. Sure it was me that gave the ball away, Waterford went down the field and got a goal so I, more than anyone, knows what it’s like.”

The league final victory over Cork in Thurles last Sunday didn’t spark a wave of euphoria, just refocused the minds for Wexford in Nowlan Park on May 29th.

“I don’t know if you could see but no one got too carried away at the end of it. Championship is what we really want – I know it is great to win the league final and it’s a medal, it’s nothing to be sneezed at but we have Wexford in four weeks’ time and if we are not ready for them . . .

“We played them two years ago down in Nowlan Park as well and they gave us an awful beating. We are under no illusions we’ll have to be up for it to beat them.”