Responsibility on Galway to tidy up club hurling championships

Inside Track with John McIntyre

No county escaped the ravages of Covid-19 on their GAA fixtures calendar last year, but Galway club hurling suffered the most of all, with not a single championship completed bar the senior title race which saw St Thomas’ complete a notable hat-trick by overcoming Turloughmore at Kenny Park.

Even allowing for the serious impact of the pandemic, the optics of that reality don’t look good for Galway and with an overhang of so many competitions from 2020, local hurling officials face a massive challenge in trying to get everything concluded this year, especially as the main club action may not even start until early September.

Of course, an early Galway elimination from the Liam McCarthy Cup would ease some of that pressure, but that scenario represents a double-edged sword. In any event, based on last year’s form, the Tribesmen remain serious title contenders and have realistic prospects of reaching the All-Ireland final on the second last weekend of August.

Complicating the task of ‘catching up’ on last year’s unfinished business and running off the 2021 county championships is that Galway are still involved in the 2020 minor and U20 inter-county title races, with each team facing the prospect of two matches if things go well. It’s hard to credit that Brian Hanley guided Galway minors to All-Ireland glory in August of 2019, beating Kilkenny 3-14 to 0-12, and they haven’t played a championship match since.

Hanley, like U20 manager Jeffrey Lynskey, is currently in the unenviable position of trying to prepare understandably enlarged squads for two different championships. That is a difficult proposition by any standards, particularly as we still don’t have any scheduling for the completion of these championships from last year.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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