Archive News
Time for Connacht to throw caution to the wind
Date Published: {J}
THESE are dog days at the Sportsground. A ninth consecutive defeat has left all involved with Connacht rugby feeling bruised and tender. It’s not the hole where Eric Elwood had anticipated his squad would end up at this stage of the season. This grim situation is killing them all – from Chief Executive Gerry Kelly down – but they are simply going to have tough it out.
The last thing Connacht need now is sympathy and platitudes. Eric Elwood, Gavin Duffy and all the rest of them are here to win. Losing hurts them badly despite the manner in which the dice is loaded against the men from the West. Nobody knows it better than them that the lack of budget and resources continued to screw the squad on the field, but they have no desire to hide behind those ready-made excuses for the province’s current woes.
The reality is that Connacht have been losing matches that they had chances to win and while it might be stretching things to suggest last Saturday’s Heineken Cup encounter against Gloucester was another one of those occasions, the home team had serious momentum early in the second back when pulling back an 11-nil deficit to one point, but once again they failed to drive on and were unable to close the deal.
Another big crowd of over 5,000 turned up at the Sportsground and though Connacht were once again admirably competitive, some typically poor decision-making – notably, Niall O’Connor’s baffling decision to opt for a garryowen in the last play of the game – and unforced errors continue to haunt them. It was a match that they had targeted, but Gloucester were the stronger outfit and had the possession and territory to prove it.
O’Connor’s early penalty miss from a relatively routine penalty wouldn’t have helped Connacht’s brittle confidence as the struggling English Premiership outfit established an 11-nil advantage by the 31st minute thanks to two Freddie Burns penalty and a close range try from James Simpson-Daniel. Connacht were in a bad place, but directly from the kick-off, Duffy pounced on a loose ball in midfield – the product of Ray Ofisa’s work in dispossessing Luke Narraway – for an opportunist try, converted by O’Connor.
When the Connacht out half reduced the deficit to the minimum soon after the resumption, the momentum was firmly with Elwood’s squad, but they just didn’t have the cutting edge to rattle Harlequins even more. Instead, the visitors gradually regained control of the exchanges, with Burns adding a third penalty, and spending virtually the last ten minutes deep inside the Connacht 22. In fact, they closed out the game with relative ease.
With the return Heineken Cup leg coming up on Saturday, followed by daunting Rabo Direct Pro 12 encounters against Leinster and Munster, there is no respite for Connacht in the short term. They looked a battle weary outfit by the close of the Gloucester match, while morale and confidence must be at seasonal low now. It’s an awful predicament and injuries aren’t helping either – they could have done with Michael Swift’s grunt and Johnny O’Connor’s tenacity at the weekend.
Yet, there is nothing to be served by the Connacht camp beating themselves up. They have to stick together, plough on and, hope, some day, the breaks will go in their favour. One thing for sure, this squad are no quitters and the bottom line is that they still have a chance of making history at Kingsholm this weekend by chalking up a first ever Heineken Cup victory.
Nobody will give them a chance but, if anything, the public mood should inspire rather than deflate them. It’s time for the underdogs to throw caution to the wind, especially in a fixture which most sees the outcome of as already a done deal. The Connacht players, however, must embrace the build up to the match in a positive light – the prospect of breaking new ground, rather than going out to avoid a tenth consecutive defeat.
For more, read this week’s Connacht 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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