Rout in Ruislip

Galway  3-17

London 0-7

What started out as a mission seemingly fraught with peril ended up being a romp in the London sunshine as Galway demolished the challenge of the home side with a minimum of fuss at Ruislip on Sunday in this Connacht championship quarter-final.

The game had died a death before the third minute of play had elapsed when Michael Martin climaxed a slick Galway attacking move with a clinical finish to the back of Adrian Faherty’s net putting Alan Mulholland’s side into a 1-2 to 0-0 lead.

After 15 minutes, Galway had strolled into a 1-6 to zero lead and by then the competitive lifeblood had been sucked from this contest — after that the crowd of close on 5,000 people concentrated primarily on accessing more bottles of Magners.

There was a carnival atmosphere in the West London outpost of the GAA with the temperatures touching 20 degrees and a huge Galway contingent in the crowd — many had expected a tight call but the word on the ground on the run-up to this match was that London were a long way back from last year.

And so they were. Galway were yards ahead of them in terms of pace, ball movement and forward slickness as London struggled to get within touching distance of opponents determined not to make the GAA headlines for the wrong reasons.

Galway won’t go red in the face with false optimism after this 19 point winning margin against London but they will take some real satisfaction from the fact that they came to do a job as efficiently and quickly as possible. In that regard they ticked all the right boxes — London’s failings were not the fault of Galway.

For the first 35 minutes of this match, there was the real fear that London would not raise even one white flag and when they did there was a certain irony in the fact that it was goalkeeper Adrian Faherty who hit the target from a placed ball.

Faherty had a fine match between the posts and ended up as joint top scorer on three points with sub Lorcan Mulvey but overall this was akin to trying to stop the tide with a load of sandbags. London were out of their depth and overwhelmed from start to finish.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.