High flying Galwegians turn it around in big city derby clash

Corinthians 10

Galwegians 18

THE dressing rooms were that bit quieter, the warm up drills a little sharper, the noise from the upstairs clubhouse that bit louder and the faces in the opposite side of the field a little more familiar.

Derby days are different and with so much to think about, the rugby often suffers, but the well of stories from such games never seems to dissipate. The sports scribe’s job is made a lot easier when familiar foes square up.

This was just the second Galway city derby in the All Ireland League in 17 years and much like the first two seasons ago, it got bogged down in errors, tension and ‘safety first’ rugby. Here were two sides, that can open it up with the best of them in their league, overpowered by a chilling desire to win or perhaps more importantly, a fear of losing.

The old cliche about not wanting it enough belies an equally important opposite effect, where a team wants it too much. Games like this can expose the importance of balancing the desire levels, if the overpowering will to win consumes a team, the performance suffers and the processes that everyone from Joe Schmidt down to mini coaches in Barna now talk about, are affected accordingly.

As a result of all that, we had a poor enough spectacle in front of the biggest crowd of the season at Corinthian Park on Friday night. The lights were on, the rain stayed away for most of the game – save for one shower of biblical proportions – and the wind howled as it nearly always does at this venue.

Corinthians notched ten points with the elements, but  Galwegians came back at them with 18 points of their own after half time and underlined their superiority in the league standings by showing greater precision in scoring positions and making less errors overall.

During the Eddie O’Sullivan era of Irish rugby, the catchphrase control the controllable took hold. Friday was a game where the total number of controllable factors for each team were scarce but it is safe to say that of the few that were there, they were managed better by the men in sky blue.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Sentinel.