Archive News
Helebert highlights honesty of effort as the key to victory
Date Published: {J}
CIARAN TIERNEY
Same venue, same occasion, different world. They put the floodlights out early on the Galway supporters, management, and players as they celebrated on the Semple Stadium pitch on Saturday night – and quite a few of those present must have wished that the lights had gone off at some stage during that infamous 25 point drubbing by Tipperary 12 months ago.
For half of the current Galway U-21 panel, their reaction to that massacre could have gone either way. They could have let it get to them, they could have wallowed in the pain, but instead they focused all of their energies into the long road back to redemption which ended with the Cross of Cashel Cup in the Galway dressing-room on Saturday night.
They had 11 months to wait before they got a shot at redeeming themselves, against Limerick in last month’s semi-final, and few Galway people on the way to Thurles could have expected such a wonderful all-round team performance in the final.
And central to that renaissance, clearly, was the decision by team manager Anthony Cunningham to appoint two new selectors for his third year in charge. Neither Mattie Kenny nor Tom Helebert were involved in last year’s humiliating defeat in Tipperary’s own back yard and they clearly got the mood right in the training sessions since the 2011 panel regrouped in May.
Kenny and Helebert both had a ‘hands on’ role in training and the kind of swift tactical manoeuvring which saw the excellent Bernard Burke replace Tadhg Haran in the half-forward line, even though the Liam Mellows man had registered 1-3.
“We could ask for no more from this group of players,” said a delighted Helebert as the celebrations raged around the Galway dressing-room after the game. “I remember last year’s final well. I was down at the game here and you’d be horrified for the emotion of the players, because they had a very bad experience. But, when you look forward, you cannot let one game define your whole future. You have to put a defeat like that behind you.”
Perhaps the new voices at the sessions and new drills galvanised the players, but the team who went straight into the semi-final enjoyed a rare intensity in training this year. So much so that it was hard for the selectors to pick their starting XV. There were to be no sideshows or arguments over venues in 2011.
“Where I come from, at the end of the day, you turn up and you play. You compete. All we worked on in training all year long was getting fellas to be honest with themselves and to come to the table with work-rate, intensity, and honesty about the way they played. That was a feature of our training and any fella who wasn’t willing to contribute to that was found out,” said Helebert.
“What you have to build on is the mutual respect between the management and the players, and push on and work together for the common goal. We were very honest with the lads and they were very honest with us and we’ve ended up with the objective achieved. That’s what we are most proud about, that as a group of lads they worked to a man. Nobody let us down.”
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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