Archive News
Gort captain Coen sums up spirit of new champs
Date Published: {J}
STEPHEN GLENNON
ANDY Coen slumps against the wall and wipes his lips. Battered and bruised, dehydrated and mentally drained, a lesser soldier would crumble. Not the Gort captain though.
He has just delivered one of the most charismatic, passionate and noble victory speeches ever to grace Pearse Stadium and, right now, he is floating carelessly somewhere between the heady heights of a club hurler’s Utopia and the need for a deep slumber.
Sunday’s county final may have been the hardest game he ever played, but having waited so long for a county championship senior medal, he is not going to rest the weary body just yet. On these occasions, you look to find those hidden depths, as Gort did in the closing minutes of an exciting county final. Coen fervently draws the water from the well once again . . . a well that had previously been dry and dormant for 28 years.
“We would have put a certain amount of pressure on ourselves to make sure we performed. Every day before we went out in matches, we said we were to expect that of ourselves and put the pressure on ourselves to perform and, today, while at times it didn’t look good, we dug deep and got there in the end,” says the Gort captain.
Gort had signalled their intentions from the off in this contest, evoking a war cry fuelled by a thirst, by a hunger, by an intensity. Coen says, though, that this was something they had been very conscious of, given, one, the team had not started well in their quarter or semi-final games against Loughrea or St. Thomas’ and, two, by the mere fact that they were facing the All-Ireland club champions.
“We had to put pressure on David Forde and we had to put pressure on Jamie Cannon and Michael Donoghue and stop Barry Daly’s runs. Once we had our midfield and half-forwards putting the pressure on, we built our base from that. Once we got to half-time, we knew then we had to push on from the start of the second half.”
This they did initially, although the concession of a “freak” goal on 46 minutes – to secure Clarinbridge parity – threatened to undo all their earlier fine work, but Coen says there was a realisation that these things can happen in the final and the test of any team’s credentials is how they deal with these setbacks. He maintains Gort had the team – and, more importantly – the squad to do that.
“You often hear about teams down through the years that they have nothing on the bench and I suppose, truth be told, if they had them on the bench they would be on the field at some stage or other. But we are lucky that we have had a lot of underage players coming through the last few years and we just had a situation this year where we had two or three lads who were absolutely chomping at the bit to get on.
“Those players were unlucky not to start and the main idea was to have them not happy on the line so that when they did come in they would use that to get themselves into the game. Even against Loughrea, you saw that when Keith Killilea came on and got a great goal. Martin Nestor also chipped in during that game while Albert Mullins also contributed.
“Today, Kris Finnegan, who had come back from London, came on in goal and did his bit. So, everyone did their bit at some stage [during the championship]. And that is the way you have to have your subs. They cannot be happy on the line. They have to be mad for road.”
For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.
People’s living conditions less than 100 years ago were frightening. We have come a long way. We talk about water charges today, but back then the local District Councils were erecting pumps for local communities and the lovely town of Mountbellew, according to Council minutes, had open sewers,” says Galway County Council archivist Patria McWalter.
Patria believes we “need to take pride in our history, and we should take the same pride in our historical records as we do in our built heritage”. When you see the wealth of material in her care, this belief makes sense.
She is in charge of caring for the rich collection of administrative records owned by Galway County Council and says “these records are as much part of our history as the Rock of Cashel is. They document our lives and our ancestors’ lives. And nobody can plan for the future unless you learn from the past, what worked and what didn’t”.
Archivists and librarians are often unfairly regarded as being dry, academic types, but that’s certainly not true of Patria. Her enthusiasm is infectious as she turns the pages of several minute books from Galway’s Rural District Councils, all of them at least 100 years old.
Part of her role involved cataloguing all the records of the Councils – Ballinasloe, Clifden, Galway, Gort, Loughrea, Mountbellew, Portumna and Tuam. These records mostly consisted of minutes of various meetings.
When she was cataloguing them she realised their worth to local historians and researchers, so she decided to compile a guide to their content. The result is For the Record: The Archives of Galway’s Rural District Councils, which will be a valuable asset to anybody with an interest in history.
Many representatives on these Councils were local personalities and several were arrested during the political upheaval of the era, she explains.
And, ushering in a new era in history, women were allowed to sit on these Rural District Councils – at the time they were not allowed to sit on County Councils.
All of this information is included in Patria’s introductory essay to the attractively produced A4 size guide, which gives a glimpse into how these Rural Councils operated and the way political thinking changed in Ireland during a short 26-year period. In the early 1900s, these Councils supported Home Rule, but by 1920, they were calling for full independence and refusing to recognise the British administration.
“I love the tone,” says Patria of the minutes from meetings. “The language was very emotive.”
That was certainly true of the Gort Rural District Council. At a meeting in 1907, following riots in Dublin at the premiere of JM Synge’s play, The Playboy of the Western World the councillors’ response was vehement. They recorded their decision to “protest most emphatically against the libellous comedy, The Playboy of the Western World, that was belched forth during the past week in the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, under the fostering care of Lady Gregory and Mr Yeats. We congratulate the good people of Dublin in howling down the gross buffoonery and immoral suggestions that are scattered throughout this scandalous performance.
For more from the archives see this week’s Tribunes here
Date Published: 23-Jan-2013
SLIGO 0-9
GALWAY 1-4
FRANK FARRAGHER IN ENNISCRONE
GALWAY’S first serious examination of the 2013 season rather disturbingly ended with a rating well below the 40% pass mark at the idyllic, if rather Siberian, seaside setting of Enniscrone on Sunday last.
The defeat cost Galway a place in the FBD League Final against Leitrim and also put a fair dent on their confidence shield for the bigger tests that lie ahead in February.
There was no fluke element in this success by an understrength Sligo side and by the time Leitrim referee, Frank Flynn, sounded the final whistle, there wasn’t a perished soul in the crowd of about 500 who could question the justice of the outcome.
It is only pre-season and last Sunday’s blast of dry polar winds did remind everyone that this is far from summer football, but make no mistake about it, the match did lay down some very worrying markers for Galway following a couple of victories over below par third level college teams.
Galway did start the game quite positively, leading by four points at the end of a first quarter when they missed as much more, but when Sligo stepped up the tempo of the game in the 10 minutes before half-time, the maroon resistance crumbled with frightening rapidity.
Some of the statistics of the match make for grim perusal. Over the course of the hour, Galway only scored two points from play and they went through a 52 minute period of the match, without raising a white flag – admittedly a late rally did bring them close to a draw but that would have been very rough justice on Sligo.
Sligo were backable at 9/4 coming into this match, the odds being stretched with the ‘missing list’ on Kevin Walsh’s team sheet – Adrian Marren, Stephen Coen, Tony Taylor, Ross Donovan, David Kelly, David Maye, Johnny Davey and Eamon O’Hara, were all marked absent for a variety of reasons.
Walsh has his Sligo side well schooled in the high intensity, close quarters type of football, and the harder Galway tried to go through the short game channels, the more the home side bottled them up.
Galway badly needed to find some variety in their attacking strategy and maybe there is a lot to be said for the traditional Meath style of giving long, quick ball to a full forward line with a big target man on the edge of the square – given Paul Conroy’s prowess close to goal last season, maybe it is time to ‘settle’ on a few basics.
Defensively, Galway were reasonably solid with Gary Sice at centre back probably their best player – he was one of the few men in maroon to deliver decent long ball deep into the attacking zone – while Finian Hanley, Conor Costello and Gary O’Donnell also kept things tight.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
Date Published: 23-Jan-2013
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