Back in the Galway fold – and a place in sporting history

In this exclusive extract from his new book 100 Great GAA Controversies, JOHN SCALLY recalls a Galway legend who almost left – but came back to become a legend.

His was a talent that danced to music not yet written. In the first half of the 1998 All-Ireland final Kildare were in the ascendancy. Michael Donnellan produced a surging run, a little shimmy and scored a stunning point. In 2005, this run and score was voted ‘the greatest GAA moment of all time’ by a poll carried out for RTÉ television.

The first time I met John O’Mahony he was on the backfoot. He was under pressure because Roscommon had crushed his hot-hotly fancied Galway team in the 2001 Championship. But he was also reeling from the biggest controversy of his career. As we sat in his Ballaghadereen home savouring his wife Ger’s beautiful hot scones, our conversation was interrupted a number of times as he fielded calls from a number of GAA correspondents all seeking a headline.

A fatal setback seemed to the sensational decision of Michael and John Donnellan to withdraw from the county panel in the middle of the Championship team. Youth, impetuosity and the intense will to win go together in a highly combustible concoction.

At the time Michael Donnellan was universally recognised as one of the best, if not the best, footballer in the country – and certainly the most thrilling. The news of the Donnellans’ controversy burst so dramatically, when so much of what seemed so stable was shifting unnervingly around them, that some of the Galway camp gave convincing impersonations of skiers in an avalanche, struggling to keep their feet as the old world crumbled beneath them.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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