Galway salvage some honour

Date Published: 24-Jul-2007

Like all doomed affairs it ended in tears but Galway’s final flirtation with the championship of 2007, for all its frustrations, left a curious legacy of hope and salvaged honour.

This final qualifier with Meath at Portlaoise on Saturday produced an intense battle of wills and Galway weren’t found wanting in the heart or work ethic departments — at the end of the day though, a few basic defensive errors took a savage toll.

Meath and Galway are teams trying to rebuild, but the Leinster side seemed to have gone about that task a bit more wholeheartedly than Galway, fuelled by a traditional mental strength and a refreshing directness in the way they play the game.

Often it took Galway four to five passes to get the ball into their full forward line — by contrast Meath booted the ball into their inside line as fast as possible. They are a route one team in every sense of the word.

There was a sense of the ‘Ger Loughnane’ mentality in the approach to this game with Galway not announcing their team until Saturday . . . from Thursday evening on though, the rumours had spread like wildfire throughout the county that some of the big names were to be axed. Maybe last Thursday night it should have been time ‘to call a spade, a spade’.

Sure enough as three o clock approached on Saturday there was confirmation that old heroes Declan Meehan, Padraic Joyce and Derek Savage were not in the starting line-up . . . as things transpired though it emerged that the most critical change of all in defence had not been made.

Corner back Damien Burke had been in desperate trouble all through the Connacht final against a lively Sligo corner forward in David Kelly — the Corofin player after a very good league campaign struggled against Leitrim and Sligo. A tough call needed to be made and wasn’t . . . a high price was paid………