Galway footballers are a case in point. In the space of 11 months, they have morphed from injury-time fall guys to nerveless Houdinis at the death.
“If the game the last day ended with Mayo winning by a point, we’d be saying a lot of different things here, like it’s nearly we have so much to work on,” admits their skipper Seán Kelly.
“Small margins cannot just win games; the whole aftershock with it too can change. It is a championship of small margins, and it’s something hopefully we stay on the right side of for the rest of the year.”
So far, so positive as Kelly’s heroes prepare to welcome Derry to Pearse Stadium tomorrow evening (5.30).
They wouldn’t even have reached a Connacht final but for Rob Finnerty’s injury-time goal to break Sligo hearts. A fortnight later, they trailed Mayo by two in stoppage-time only to leapfrog their greatest rivals with a hat-trick of frees.
And with one deadly swing of Connor Gleeson’s right boot, all the talk of Pádraic Joyce’s record against Mayo was drowned out by a new narrative: Galway as three-in-a-row kings of Connacht, Galway with all their marquee men back, getting sharper by the week, and back in the Sam Maguire conversation.
Still, it’s not as if their group is a doddle. League champions Derry, luckless Ulster runners-up Armagh and doughty underdogs Westmeath constitute a less-than-straightforward route to the knockout stages. Especially if you harbour ambitions of taking the direct, table-topping route to the quarter-finals.
Galway looked set to do so last year. But then, in one fatal week, their season was torpedoed by consecutive one-point defeats.
They failed to top their group because of Rory Grugan’s 74th-minute free for Armagh. That forced them into a last-12 detour, where they threatened an injury-time goal against Mayo but had to settle for a futile point instead.
Against this backdrop, Kelly says Galway were “putting pressure on ourselves over how badly we wanted to win” this year’s Connacht final.
“Pádraic would have been saying himself how badly he wanted to win it too as Mayo got the better of us in the last couple of years and knocked us out of the championship. While it wasn’t a knockout game, there was that edge from both teams,” he relates.
But it’s parked. “We have a lot more to do. That title is in the past. While we enjoyed that for a couple of days, we have a massive challenge against Derry,” he stresses.
That challenge, against high-flying league champions who crashed to earth when conceding four goals to Donegal, comes laced with tactical intrigue.
All eyes will be on Derry ’keeper Odhrán Lynch to see if he presses up on Gleeson’s booming kick-outs – especially given how this high-press, high-risk strategy led directly to three Donegal goals the last day. Mickey Harte has had four weeks to reflect and potentially recalibrate.
“They’ve done it all year, so do they change it after one game? I know Donegal got great joy off it, so who knows?” Kelly muses. “You kind of have to adjust on the fly in-game, be like ‘what’s happening here?’. If they don’t, they’re probably a body down in the press and it’s something we can look to exploit as well. Who knows what they do.”
It shouldn’t be forgotten that Lynch’s wanderlust was a key factor in Damien Comer’s breakaway goal in the 2022 All-Ireland semi-final. As Comer’s man-of-the-match display against Mayo underlined, the return of Galway’s marquee players from their famously overcrowded casualty department has fuelled optimism for the coming weeks.
Kelly is among those to have battled through a “frustrating” period of stop-start disruption and come out the far side, even if he has yet to recapture his stellar 2023 levels.
In February, he came off the Salthill bench at half-time with the injury-depleted hosts two points adrift of Derry but with the wind now on their backs.
“We were right in it,” he recalls – but “a few sloppy turnovers”, two black cards and two further Derry goals later, they were en route to a five-point defeat.
In some ways, that summed up Galway’s spring. But with key players like Comer, Kelly, Shane Walsh, Liam Silke, Matthew Tierney (off the bench against Mayo) and Cillian McDaid (an unused sub that day) back in the match-day mix, it’s not merely that options are growing for Joyce’s management team. So too is the mood lifting.
“Having lads back like that is huge for us. It gives us good momentum,” their Moycullen leader proclaims. “At the same time, we know it is a huge battle to not just get a starting 15 jersey, but to get on to the 26. We have a lot of lads there who put in a great pre-season and a great league campaign, strengthening the depth in the panel.”
Reflecting on those nail-biting successes in Connacht, Kelly describes winning as a habit that could “springboard our season”.
And looking forward to what comes next, he concludes: “Getting that top seed is important . . . it avoids playing an extra game, that prelim which is a huge battle and you’re playing three weeks in a row.
“You do have to put that pressure on yourself, but also we know it’s going to be a huge challenge. It’s not just Derry, it’s three great teams.”
