Awful footballers come close to shock exit

Galway 1-12  Waterford 0-14

NOT one for the scrapbook. No, the Galway players, in 50 years’ time, will hardly sit down and reminisce with grandchildren about the day they beat Waterford by a point.

It’s worth saying again. Galway, once a traditional football powerhouse, at home in Pearse Stadium on Saturday, managed to defeat Waterford, whose greatest ever football achievement was reaching an All-Ireland final 115 years ago – they didn’t even win it! – by one solitary point. And they were fortunate to have done so.

That’s where we’re at, ladies and gentlemen; that’s how far Galway football has sunk. Just when you think rock bottom has been hit, along comes another absolute stinker of a display like this one that prompts you to wonder how many decades, rather than years, will pass before Galway returns to the top. That’s how bleak the picture appears this week, and we haven’t even been knocked out of the championship yet!

Of course the result is what matters and Galway will do well to forget this abomination and try to move on as soon as possible and re-group now for round three of the qualifiers. In the past few seasons this is a game Galway would have lost, so showing character and pulling it out of the fire so dramatically late-on must also be applauded.

They can rightly point to progress being made in terms of getting one stage further in the back-door this year compared with last year; and now it’s two wins on the trot following on from the previous week’s less than convincing success over Tipperary.

But when the epitaph of Galway’s 2013 football season is being written, the phrase ‘we were lucky to scrape by Waterford by a point’ will give as much comfort to grieving Galway as the 17 points Mayo mauling in the Connacht championship two months’ ago does.

They didn’t so much stumble over the line as crawl over it. The Galway players and management were relieved at the final whistle on Saturday but you sense they were embarrassed too. They’re not stupid. They know this was a whisker away from a calamitous championship exit.

The game in a nutshell was this: Galway led by 0-10 to 0-7 at the break having played well in patches with the wind, as Waterford put up stiff resistance. Galway failed to score for the first 22 minutes of the second half, by which time Waterford had hit six unanswered points and led 0-13 to 0-10 with under a quarter hour to go.

The 7/1 underdogs were still one point up and hanging in for a famous victory when Michael Meehan struck for goal with seven minutes remaining that clinched the match. Galway scarcely deserved it.