Bonus territory for footballers against Rebels

IF any Galway football supporter had predicted on the Sunday evening of May 19 last that the county would be playing in Croke Park at the end of July, and be just one match away from an All-Ireland quarter-final, the ‘men in white coats’ would have been called in straight away.

That evening in Pearse Stadium, Galway had been on the end of a savage 17 point mauling at the hands of Mayo and any journey through the qualifiers looked like being a short and painful one.

Now over two months after that Pearse Stadium humiliation, Galway travel to meet Cork in Croke Park on Saturday (throw-in: 5pm) for a joust with the All-Ireland champions of 2010, and while Alan Mulholland’s side come into this game as massive underdogs, they are not without their sprigs of hope.

Football and sport can be a strange business but it is pretty much agreed all-round by managers, players and sports psychologists that the mercurial commodities of confidence and morale are dependent on success and that winning feeling.

Galway did get the breaks in the qualifiers draw . . . three home matches in a row and the first one against a Division 4 side. Victories followed against Tipperary and Waterford, and while those successes were hard earned and lacking in frill, they still served to engender a thread of belief in the players.

Those wins of humble enough status allowed Galway to come in under the radar of Armagh and the media in the run-up to last weekend’s qualifier at Pearse Stadium, resulting in one of the shocks of the season so far, although on more cold analysis, there was probably never much between those two teams.

All through the league and even in the aftermath of the Mayo defeat, there was a feeling out there that Galway were not as bad as they looked, even if many obvious gaps did exist in key positions to match the current big guns of football.

Galway had put in a hard graft over the winter and early spring periods, but the confidence and belief that can transform mediocrity into something far more potent, just wasn’t there. Last weekend against Armagh, it arrived in a gush, and what a welcome boost that was to hard pressed fans of the maroon.

This week it’s a case of Galway taking on board the famous line from Kipling about treating the two impostors of triumph and disaster just the same, as they balance out the elation of the Armagh victory against their Mayo disaster and their near fatal stumbles against Tipperary and Waterford.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.