Archive News
Underdogs Galway all set to test the mettle of fancied Lilywhites
Date Published: 18-Apr-2013
Dara Bradley
MOST football people will remember the last time a Kildare team were raging hot favourites heading into an important inter-county championship clash with Galway.
No need to gloat . . . but the bookmakers were wrong, the Lilywhites wilted, and Galway bridged a 32-year gap to win the 1998 All-Ireland senior football final.
In 2000, the last time the two counties crossed swords in championship action, it was at the penultimate stage of the senior All-Ireland series. The bookies’ forecast was reversed, Galway were favourites, but the result was the same, Galway won the semi-final.
Obviously those results, on the surface, matter little this weekend when Galway’s young guns face Kildare in the All-Ireland U21 semi-final joust on Saturday (2pm) in Tullamore; after all, both set of players were still only in primary school back then.
It may matter less that the last time these two sides met in the All-Ireland semi-final of an U21 championship – way back in 1992 – Galway defeated what was then touted as one of the best ever U21 sides to emerge from Kildare, a side that had beaten a fancied Dublin outfit in the Leinster final.
Who cares, you say? So what?
Those three results matter little if you discount tradition . . . but tradition matters in football. Tradition matters to Kildare, who will be hell-bent breaking it, breaking with the tradition of losing to Galway in important championship games. And tradition matters to Galway, too. Because of that winning tradition against Kildare, there’s no reason why Galway should fear them this weekend.
Galway may well be underdogs, rightly so; Galway may have a healthy respect for them, they’d be stupid not to. But they won’t fear them because tradition tells us they shouldn’t fear them. Captain Fintán Ó Curraoin said as much after the Connacht final.
“That’s the attitude you want from lads, and that’s the attitude we have,” said manager Alan Flynn. “If we go down there and stand looking at them or are in awe of them then we might as well stay in Galway. The lads will go out there and have a cut at them and rattle them and see what that brings us . . . we know if we improve on the last day and play to our ability, then we have skilful lads and we’ll be in with a shout.”
Kildare’s one and only All-Ireland title at this grade was won in 1965 but it’s easy to see why the county is abuzz with anticipation that this year will be their year.
Well-respected Kildare senior boss, Kieran McGeeney, also heads the U21s, and he’s blooded a lot of youngsters into the senior set-up this year – Paul Cribbin, Mark Donnellan, Niall Kelly, Daniel Flynn and Paddy Brophy all started for Kildare in their defeat to Tyrone in the semi-final of Division One of the National Football League last weekend.
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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