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Where’s Tom Monaghan?
Must be injured so. I don’t think it’s the worst match to have a mullocker like Fahy in midfield for either tbh.
No it isn’t. That’s exactly what he’ll be asked to do. Glennon and Monaghan together are a bit lightweight imo.
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Hopefully he keeps his feet to himself this time.
Offaly’s resurgence as a hurling power took another huge step forward with a six-point win over Galway in the Leinster U-20 championship quarter-final on Saturday afternoon, while there will be further questions in Galway about their development pathway after the 2020 All-Ireland minor winners crashed out of the championship at the first hurdle, meaning that out of the four teams that won All-Ireland minor titles from 2017 through to 2020, they’ve won just one Leinster and no All-Irelands at U-20 level.
They were damn lucky to win that Leinster title v Wexford as well. Didn’t Donohue walk because there was no S&C being to done to develop players before they came onto the senior squad?
Has Big Bernie been shafted again?
Looks like it. Very harsh to drop him imo. Galway clearly don’t do kick out strategies. Being the aristocrats that we are, such things are clearly beneath us.
I think McDaid could be sensational at wing back.
I really don’t see what Joyce sees in Gleeson. There are just too many errors.
Ive said it here previously, I nearly feel sorry for the lad at this point. He can just look like a bag of nerves. Particularly under a high ball. For would be All Ireland challengers it’s too much of a risk to take.
Jaysus Mannions hair is glorious. No way he colours it
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I’m guessing that’s Ray Silke’s young lad?
Divo I reckon.
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Divilly Jnr I think.
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Galway football mourns All-Ireland winner Joe Young
The Dublin native, who has died in his 90th year at his home in Barna outside Galway city, played hurling and football for his adopted county.
Joe Young of Galway before the 1959 All-Ireland SFC final with Kerry
SUN, 07 MAY, 2023 - 17:32
JOHN FALLON
Galway may be celebrating its 49th Connacht title success but the county is also mourning a decorated dual player who has died.
Joe Young was one of three Army officers who helped Galway win the 1956 All-Ireland title when they defeated Cork in the final.
The Dublin native, who has died in his 90th year at his home in Barna outside Galway city, played hurling and football for his adopted county.
He also enjoyed considerable success in both codes with the St Vincent’s club in Dublin with the Donnycarney native winning an All-Ireland junior hurling medal with Dublin before moving to Galway where was he was stationed at Renmore barracks on the east of the city.
The Army team were strong in the Galway hurling and football championships back then and three of them — Young, Cork’s Billy O’Neill and Jack Kissane from Kerry — became key members of the team which netted the county’s fourth All-Ireland title in 1956 in an era where Frank Stockwell and Seán Purcell, ‘the Terrible Twins’, were also leaders.
O’Neill died in 2015 and Kissane passed away earlier last year and former Galway chairman John Joe Holleran said the contribution made by the Army players was huge for the county.
“There is a good history there of people making a big contribution to the GAA in Galway after moving here with the Army. All the army lads were super fit and Billy O’Neill trained the team a year or two after that win in ’56.
“In many ways, they should have won more All-Irelands but they laid the foundation for what was to come with the three-in-a-row in the 1960s.
“The Army team were strong in the county championship and teams had to raise their own fitness to match them and that, in turn, led to higher standards all round,” said Holleran.
Joe Young, a retired colonel, continued to be a strong supporter of both codes in his adopted county
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Colin Sheridan: If there’s always a tomorrow, what matters today?
Moments no longer define Gaelic football seasons.
RESPECT: Ruan Divilly, son of Galway selector John Divilly, acknowledges the crowd’s applause, during the presentation of the 1998 Galway Connacht championship winning team before the Connacht final in Castlebar. Picture: Brendan Moran/Sportsfile
MON, 15 MAY, 2023 - 06:17
COLIN SHERIDAN
Last Sunday, as an utterly forgettable Connacht final played out in front of a paltry 11,000 or so spectators, members of the 1998 Galway senior football team lurked in the shadows, sipping tea and fighting over egg sandwiches.
As has become custom on days such as these, provincial winners from 25 years previous are given the honour of parading in front of the crowd at half-time, taking the polite applause and giving the 360 degree wave, like a batsman after hitting a century. For the players and their families, it’s a nice moment, an excuse for reunion and a chance to prove to your kids that you were once capable of great things, or at least more than forgetting to put the smoothie in their lunchbox. For the rest of us, it’s an opportunity to smugly comment on who’s aged well, who’s come into a few pound, and who should consider getting the thatch done. On days such as these, so usually fraught with tension, disappointment and hopefully a little joy, the reunions offer some much needed distraction and perspective. Too often some players are absent, lost to illness or accident. Thankfully, in Galway’s case, they are all still with us.
That it was Castlebar and MacHale Park that played host to this particular team’s moment was as apt as it was ironic, for it was in that very stadium Galway announced themselves as a team who would go on to win two All-Irelands in a four-season spell.
On Sunday May 24th, 1998 to be exact, a game that lives as large in Mayo memories as it does the Tribesmen, a terrible beauty was born. If Tuam will forever be the Jerusalem of Galway football, MacHale Park is the stable that this - one of the counties greatest teams - was birthed in.
Mayo had been to the previous two All-Ireland finals, and were justifiably regarded as contenders again in ‘98. They had undergone consecutive campaigns that, despite the heartache, had brought west a romance that framed entire summers. When you’re young and innocent as I was then, you’d think it would be forever thus. This Galway team shattered that illusion, and wrote their own history in the process. How sweet it must have been for the likes of Ja Fallon, Sean Óg de Paor and Kevin Walsh to take the spots on the field last Sunday, acknowledging as I’m sure they did, that they were back at the scene of what was a crime in my eyes, but the start of a maroon-tinted revolution in theirs.
Ironic, too, because that game was the very antithesis of what inter-county Gaelic football has now become; a veritable Rubix cube of fixtures and counter-fixtures and hurrying up and waiting. We have given up what was admittedly too little and cashed it in for what is undoubtedly, now, far too much, so much, that at 9am last Sunday, I didn’t even know the Connacht final was on.
By 5pm that fateful Sunday evening 25 years ago, Mayo were toast, their season over a week before the June bank holiday weekend. The summer suddenly opened up like the Hoover Dam. Few people had mobile phones then, fewer used email, so carrier pigeons were dispatched from Blacksod Bay to McClean Avenue in the Bronx and Canton in Massachusetts.
For Galway, an entirely different menu of options presented themselves. They went on to beat Leitrim, Roscommon (after a replay), and Derry, before finding themselves in an All-Ireland final against Kildare.
I’ve often cynically opined - usually three ales in - that that run of games deserved an asterisks to be put upon their eventual All-Ireland win, so uncomplicated was their route to glory, but the reality is that Galway team was one of the most exciting and dynamic to emerge from a decade that threw surprise after surprise and coughed up seven different All-Ireland champions in Cork, Down, Derry, Dublin, Meath, Kerry and Galway. Much as it pains me to say it, Michael Donnellan in full flight remains one of the most enduring and glorious sights in sport.
As those who can remember that game will likely attest, it could have been incredibly different. Ciaran McDonald famously hit the crossbar twice in a bizarre game that ricocheted like a bullet in a ball alley. Had one of those gone in, Mayo would’ve likely ended Galway season and probably won a third Connacht title on the trot. After that? Well, you can insert your own joke here.
The point is…those games mattered so much. Too much, maybe, but they mattered in a way which is no longer possible, such is the myriad of potential outcomes from every match played so far this season.
Lest I be accused of being woozy on nostalgia, I’d be the first to admit that Gaelic football was no better a game a quarter of a century ago than it is now, but I’d wager when it’s Sean Kelly’s turn to lead out his 2023 Connacht champions in 25 years time to polite applause, he’d be doing well to remember anything about the very game his team will be feted for, as it will have been just one of a dozen they’ll played this championship season. Familiarity could soon breed contempt for Gaelic football. If everything’s important, nothing is. It’s a damn shame moments no longer define seasons, that crossbars no longer break hearts and simultaneously launch dynasties.
If there’s always a tomorrow, what matters today?
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KNOCK OUT
KNOCK OUT
KNOCK OUT!
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32 teams straight into a hat…
Ye were quiet about that when Shane Walsh was getting it in the neck
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