Ambitious St Michael’s target winning of senior football title

AFTER winning the county minor ‘A’ championship in 2020, and with underage numbers on the rise, the hierarchy in St. Michael’s GAA Club make no bones that one of their aspirations for the coming years is to win a Galway senior championship.

Some may scoff at the notion, given the city club has only appeared once in a county decider in 2014. However, the winds of change are blowing in St. Michael’s catchment area and, in turn, the club has begun to build windmills to harness it.

In recent years, the West City outfit has gone back to what it’s good at. Founded in 1956 as an underage club – it won three county minor football championships in a row between 1958 and 1960 – they have proven to be one of the top clubs in cultivating underage talent as their seven county minor ‘A’ titles underline.

Indeed, only Corofin (14), Salthill/Knocknacarra (12) and Tuam Stars (11) have won more at the grade. All those clubs have translated this underage success into senior honours; why not St. Michael’s? Club Secretary Lorcan Mannion believes they can.

“We definitely would have a senior title in our sights over the next number of years, given the numbers we have coming through and the interest that is there,” he says. “We not only have players from the Alan Glynn and Eddie Hoare era now coming through as coaches, but we now also have the young lads coming through and they don’t fear anyone.

“For a good number of years, we might have seen ourselves as second-class citizens to Salthill/Knocknacarra – nine times out of 10 they would beat us when we’d meet them – but there are young lads there now who don’t know anything else but winning. They have that winning mentality.

“So, while it would be fair to say over the last 10 years that, more often than not, our focus realistically was to hold our own at senior, with what we have coming through now though, we would have ambitions beyond that.”

St. Michael’s run in the 2020 minor championship certainly provided green shoots. In the West Board, victories over Oranmore/Maree and Salthill/Knocknacarra in the opening rounds were followed with wins over Barna and Salthill/Knocknacarra, again, in the semi-final and final respectively.

In the county final, they then saw off Claregalway on a 1-16 to 2-11 scoreline to claim a first title since 2004 – Darragh O’Malley’s second-half goal proving crucial to the outcome.

“There has been a lot of work done with the juveniles in recent years,” continues Mannion. “Like most clubs, we’ve gone through phases of rebuilding from juvenile up; 10 or 12 years ago, the juvenile wasn’t in a brilliant place, but there has been a lot of work done in the last while. The recent minor win is one of the fruits of that.”

Whenever St. Michael’s have enjoyed minor success in the past, they have reaped the benefits of it in the ensuing years, be it reaching senior county semi-finals or final or winning intermediate titles.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App

Download the Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App to access to Galway’s best-selling newspaper.

Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.

Or purchase the Digital Edition for PC, Mac or Laptop from Pagesuite  HERE.

Get the Connacht Tribune Live app
The Connacht Tribune Live app is the home of everything that is happening in Galway City and county. It’s completely FREE and features all the latest news, sport and information on what’s on in your area. Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.