Farragher to the fore as Galway champions crush Nemo

Corofin 2-19

Nemo Rangers 0-10

TOTAL Football is a well-known soccer philosophy made famous by Dutch genius Johan Cruyff and his team-mates in the 1970s – Barcelona are today’s best exponents – but somewhere along the line since then someone in Corofin must have picked up the manual and recoded it in GAA terms.

For the standard of fare and industry Corofin produced in this one-sided All-Ireland senior club football final against one of the superpowers of the club game in front of an attendance of almost 16,000 people at Croke Park on St. Patrick’s Day was nothing less than spectacular and mesmerising in the extreme.

The Galway champions victory, their third All-Ireland in the history of the club, was absolute in its totality and the dismantling of seven-time champions Nemo Rangers was as good as complete by the interval, at which time Corofin led 2-9 to 0-5.

In Artic conditions, and playing against the breeze in the opening half, one of the defining moments of the contest came in the 19th minute when Corofin pounced for their second goal to take a 2-6 to 0-1 lead.

Yes, the goal all but killed off the match but it was the breathtaking movement in the lead-up which brought the majority to their feet. Patient it began, but this proved to be just a veneer as an unbelievable explosion of play climaxed with quick hands from Daithí Burke and Ian Burke before Michael Farragher took and drove the ball beyond Nemo Rangers keeper Micheál Aodh Martin.

Words could not do it justice but the move and the goal would have fit right into Barcelona’s ‘Juego de Posicion’. Total football. Totally Corofin.

They would deliver on this all afternoon long, from the moment Gary Sice hit 1-1 in the opening exchanges right through until man of the match Martin Farragher hit his sixth point from play in time added on at the end.

Corofin were simply relentless, their endeavours fuelled by those old-fashioned words of ‘hunger’ and ‘desire’, their attention to the intricacies of the game chiselled in the carvings of kick-outs, breaking ball, their peerless movement on and off the ball, decision-making and scoring.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.