Archive News
Leinster pull off one of sportÕs greatest comebacks
Date Published: {J}
IT’S difficult to recollect a team being beaten to a pulp so badly in the first-half of a match and, somehow, still managing to drag themselves off the ropes to the extent that Leinster did in Saturday’s extraordinary Heineken Cup final at the Millennium Stadium. Heroic hardly does justice to the efforts of Jonny Sexton and company in turning a pulsating showdown around. Their comeback has already achieved legendary status.
Down 22-6 at the break having been hammered in the scrum and rocked by Northampton’s physicality and intensity, Leinster really looked a beaten docket. Brian O’Driscoll was clearly struggling with the knee injury that had seen him a doubt all week as the English Premiership side crashed over for three tries from Phil Dowson, the superb Ben Foden and Dylan Hartley.
The Leinster players must have been in a state of shock heading to the dressing room at half-time as the overwhelming favourites had taken a pounding all over the park and were scarcely hanging on. Northampton had thrown caution to the wind in laying down their markers from the off. They went for broke and were rewarded with a 16 points interval advantage that nobody would have forecast before the match. To say the least, half-time came as a mercy to Leinster.
But it also gave the players and coaching staff time to regroup and refocus. Sexton wasn’t to know it then, but he was about to produce a magnificent second-half performance which was to turn to the game on its head. The Leinster out half had talked the talk during the interval, cajoling his team-mates into believing that match still hadn’t gone from them and that sport was littered with teams rising from the dead. He went on to admirably walk the walk when returning to the battleground.
Maybe, Northampton thought that the Heineken Cup was already theirs, but the Saints seemed ill-prepared for Leinster’s defiant response on the resumption. It was like watching two different matches between the same teams in the same venue . . . and all over the space of 80 fascinating minutes. Now, it was Northampton who were taking the battering as they conceded a whopping 27 points without reply.
All over the field, the Leinster players were showing what they were made of. Nobody had ever doubted their class or ability to produce champagne rugby, but the situation they found themselves in last Saturday demanded much more. The men in blue simply had to push themselves to the limit to retrieve the situation and also display the mental strength of champions in the most difficult of circumstances. They weren’t to be found wanting on either front against tiring opponents.
Players like Shane Horgan, Richard Strauss, Nathan Hines, Jamie Heaslip and Sean O’Brien began to take the game by the scruff of the next, but it was Sexton who was inspiring them. Two tries in the third quarter and immaculate goal kicking enabled the Leinster out half to make the match almost his own personal property. He looked a class apart as he accounted for all of Leinster’s scores bar Hines’ 64th minute try.
It was a magnificent victory for Leinster and the fact that their players had to roll up their sleeves and do it the hard way to rein in Northampton underlined that they have the necessary steel and resilience to back up their undoubted talent. Winning the Heineken Cup for the second time in three seasons confirms Leinster status as the best team in Europe and is also a massive to boost to Ireland’s World Cup prospects later in the year.
Naturally, there is no shortage of celebrations out West as Leinster’s triumph paves the way for Connacht to experience Heineken Cup rugby for the first time next season. Granted, the province would have preferred to have achieved that milestone on the field themselves but, given the manner in which Connacht have often been cold shouldered since the game went professional, they have no need to apologise.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
People’s living conditions less than 100 years ago were frightening. We have come a long way. We talk about water charges today, but back then the local District Councils were erecting pumps for local communities and the lovely town of Mountbellew, according to Council minutes, had open sewers,” says Galway County Council archivist Patria McWalter.
Patria believes we “need to take pride in our history, and we should take the same pride in our historical records as we do in our built heritage”. When you see the wealth of material in her care, this belief makes sense.
She is in charge of caring for the rich collection of administrative records owned by Galway County Council and says “these records are as much part of our history as the Rock of Cashel is. They document our lives and our ancestors’ lives. And nobody can plan for the future unless you learn from the past, what worked and what didn’t”.
Archivists and librarians are often unfairly regarded as being dry, academic types, but that’s certainly not true of Patria. Her enthusiasm is infectious as she turns the pages of several minute books from Galway’s Rural District Councils, all of them at least 100 years old.
Part of her role involved cataloguing all the records of the Councils – Ballinasloe, Clifden, Galway, Gort, Loughrea, Mountbellew, Portumna and Tuam. These records mostly consisted of minutes of various meetings.
When she was cataloguing them she realised their worth to local historians and researchers, so she decided to compile a guide to their content. The result is For the Record: The Archives of Galway’s Rural District Councils, which will be a valuable asset to anybody with an interest in history.
Many representatives on these Councils were local personalities and several were arrested during the political upheaval of the era, she explains.
And, ushering in a new era in history, women were allowed to sit on these Rural District Councils – at the time they were not allowed to sit on County Councils.
All of this information is included in Patria’s introductory essay to the attractively produced A4 size guide, which gives a glimpse into how these Rural Councils operated and the way political thinking changed in Ireland during a short 26-year period. In the early 1900s, these Councils supported Home Rule, but by 1920, they were calling for full independence and refusing to recognise the British administration.
“I love the tone,” says Patria of the minutes from meetings. “The language was very emotive.”
That was certainly true of the Gort Rural District Council. At a meeting in 1907, following riots in Dublin at the premiere of JM Synge’s play, The Playboy of the Western World the councillors’ response was vehement. They recorded their decision to “protest most emphatically against the libellous comedy, The Playboy of the Western World, that was belched forth during the past week in the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, under the fostering care of Lady Gregory and Mr Yeats. We congratulate the good people of Dublin in howling down the gross buffoonery and immoral suggestions that are scattered throughout this scandalous performance.
For more from the archives see this week’s Tribunes here
Date Published: 23-Jan-2013
SLIGO 0-9
GALWAY 1-4
FRANK FARRAGHER IN ENNISCRONE
GALWAY’S first serious examination of the 2013 season rather disturbingly ended with a rating well below the 40% pass mark at the idyllic, if rather Siberian, seaside setting of Enniscrone on Sunday last.
The defeat cost Galway a place in the FBD League Final against Leitrim and also put a fair dent on their confidence shield for the bigger tests that lie ahead in February.
There was no fluke element in this success by an understrength Sligo side and by the time Leitrim referee, Frank Flynn, sounded the final whistle, there wasn’t a perished soul in the crowd of about 500 who could question the justice of the outcome.
It is only pre-season and last Sunday’s blast of dry polar winds did remind everyone that this is far from summer football, but make no mistake about it, the match did lay down some very worrying markers for Galway following a couple of victories over below par third level college teams.
Galway did start the game quite positively, leading by four points at the end of a first quarter when they missed as much more, but when Sligo stepped up the tempo of the game in the 10 minutes before half-time, the maroon resistance crumbled with frightening rapidity.
Some of the statistics of the match make for grim perusal. Over the course of the hour, Galway only scored two points from play and they went through a 52 minute period of the match, without raising a white flag – admittedly a late rally did bring them close to a draw but that would have been very rough justice on Sligo.
Sligo were backable at 9/4 coming into this match, the odds being stretched with the ‘missing list’ on Kevin Walsh’s team sheet – Adrian Marren, Stephen Coen, Tony Taylor, Ross Donovan, David Kelly, David Maye, Johnny Davey and Eamon O’Hara, were all marked absent for a variety of reasons.
Walsh has his Sligo side well schooled in the high intensity, close quarters type of football, and the harder Galway tried to go through the short game channels, the more the home side bottled them up.
Galway badly needed to find some variety in their attacking strategy and maybe there is a lot to be said for the traditional Meath style of giving long, quick ball to a full forward line with a big target man on the edge of the square – given Paul Conroy’s prowess close to goal last season, maybe it is time to ‘settle’ on a few basics.
Defensively, Galway were reasonably solid with Gary Sice at centre back probably their best player – he was one of the few men in maroon to deliver decent long ball deep into the attacking zone – while Finian Hanley, Conor Costello and Gary O’Donnell also kept things tight.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
Date Published: 23-Jan-2013
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