THE amount of bandaging on Rob Finnerty’s left leg has gradually reduced as this Championship season progressed towards Sunday’s Armagh-v-Galway finale.
After a knee issue ruled the injury-plagued Salthill-Knocknacarra forward out of the All-Ireland group game against Westmeath, the Galway rumour mill churned out stories that he’d miss the rest of the season.
But with his leg strapped like an Egyptian mummy, Finnerty returned with 0-3 against Armagh in Sligo and his four points against Donegal in the All-Ireland semi-final have brought his Championship total to 1-33 in eight games. Dublin’s defence is the only one to keep him scoreless in this campaign and Shane Walsh (0-7) and Cillian McDaid (0-3) picked up the slack as the Tribesmen knocked out the defending champions.
“There’s no denying that I was injured there for a while – you could tell by the tape!” says the affable primary school teacher.
“Luckily we’ve got a great medical team and the management team have helped manage the (training) load and I’m back to full fitness now.
“The strapping was there to protect me from doing any further damage but I wasn’t necessarily playing with any real pain and the knee is all good – it’s all cleared up.”
Finnerty is of course the son of former Mayo star Anthony who finished on the losing side in the 1989 and 1996 All-Ireland finals. The Finnerty’s are well settled in Galway by now and Rob (who was on the losing side in the 2022 decider) says his father has been a “massive influence” on his career.
“We would talk a lot about football but it’s more things nowadays – we wouldn’t really talk about 1989, or the past too much,” says Rob.
“To be fair he doesn’t really like to bring it up or talk about himself too often, we prefer to talk about games that are happening now – local club games or whatever. We both have a big interest in football but a lot of it would be about what’s happening at the minute.
“He took my Salthill team the whole way up – John Maher was involved in that team as well, we’re the same age – and we played the whole way up together with my dad managing us.”
Maher – who has emerged as a tower of strength in the Galway half-forward line this season – and Finnerty were best friends growing up and they retained that bond into adulthood.
“It’s special now that we’re going on to hopefully win an All-Ireland together,” says Finnerty.
“With Salthill we’d have won everything and that went the whole way through to minor – we won two Connacht minor titles together. John was always a massive cog in that team and he went straight into the senior team at Salthill and had an impact straight away. He’s always been a serious footballer.
“He was asked into Galway panels but didn’t commit straight away because he was doing different things but from the day he did come in he’s had an impact.”
THE Finnerty family, Galway and Mayo GAA particularly and the GAA in general was saddened recently by the news that former manager John O’Mahony had passed away.
O’Mahony guided his native Mayo to that 1989 All-Ireland final and went on to win the Sam Maguire twice with Padraic Joyce-spearheaded Galway in 1998 and 2001. More recently, he managed Rob Finnerty and John Maher at Salthill-Knocknacarra and inspired the side to the Galway SFC final in 2022.
“I was one of the few lads on the Galway panel who was lucky enough to work with ‘Johno’ and he had a massive impact on me personally – as a person let alone a footballer,” said Rob.
“He was great and he meant a lot to all of us. In Salthill he came in and he almost changed the culture in the club. He had a huge impact on our team in a short period of time and he brought that belief to a dressingroom. Straight away, from the day we met him, we knew we had an opportunity to go and contest the Frank Fox and we almost won it.
“He played me in a deeper role at Salthill, kind of a play-making role at times and he was the first person to do that with me. That’s something he had seen in me that maybe other coaches hadn’t and we spoke a lot about that and about kick-passing and things like that. He had a great effect on me.
“You’d see at times I’ll play out a bit further with Galway as well – I’m not always close to goal – and ‘Johno’ was the first person to bring that to me. My dad always spoke very highly of him and he trained him as well.”
FINNERTY’S off-the-ball movement is unorthodox and that can make him a nightmare for even the best man-markers. He may not get the same coverage as Shane Walsh or Damien Comer but with the ball in his hands he has the ability to create space for a shot when surrounded by defenders and his left foot is deadly when he’s in range of the posts.
Scoring is something that came naturally to him, he says, but he has had to work hard on reinforcing his slender frame for the rigours of senior inter-county football.
“As a minor I probably didn’t have to develop that (scoring) as much but physically it does take that good few years to become a senior player,” he says.
“It’s that age of 22-23 that lads are breaking into their senior team and I was no different. It took those few years of gym work and learning those small little nuggets – minor football is a lot different to senior football in terms of how teams set up so I had a lot to learn.
“You’re always looking for ways to improve. If I’d spoken to any of my management team about where I could get better, they’d always have said: ‘Physically maybe you could get that bit stronger?’ So in the off-season that was always something I’d be looking at, trying to get a bit stronger.”
As a teacher at Shantalla Primary School he has plenty of time on his hands this week as he counts down the seconds to throw-in on Sunday. The Finnerty family have a pub in Salthill but he won’t be seen in there, he’ll stick tight with his Galway team-mates and keep his mind on the prize.
“It’ll mainly just be meeting up with the lads in the group and trying to stay in that bubble,” he says.
“We’ll meet up for food, a swim, or coffees, or recovery, or whatever and try and stay away from the noise as much as possible. You hear it (the noise) but you don’t want to get caught up in the pre-match stuff too much, you just focus on going and getting the job done.
“At this time of the year it’s the Galway players you’d mainly be meeting up with anyway and maybe some of my friends from school but they know themselves not to be talking too much around the football.”
