Brilliant Galway make right fools of hurling public

ALL it took was one match to blow the All-Ireland hurling championship wide open and to smash all those pre-conceived ideas that the destination of the McCarthy Cup in 2012 was already a done deal. And not for the first time it took Galway to throw a major spanner in the works after they rocked Croke Park last Sunday with the county’s best summer performance for years.

Just like their couple of shock All-Ireland semi-final victories over Cork in the seventies, hardly anything was expected of Galway against a Kilkenny team which had dominated hurling for the previous decade and there was so little hype about the Leinster final locally, that you’d nearly be inclined to forget that the game was even going ahead. Demand for tickets was slow, nearly everybody was talking about the Volvo and supporters were openly fearful that Galway might be hammered.

Against that backdrop, it was no surprise that a paltry crowd of just over 22,000 turned up in Croke Park, but those Galway fans who stayed away will regret missing their resurgent team subjecting the All-Ireland champions to a hiding. Nobody saw it coming and even though the Galway team management had bravely publicly stated that they were expecting a ‘big performance’, the vast majority of hurling people thought the Tribesmen were on a hiding to nothing.

In retrospect, the foundations were there for a Galway ambush. Their reshaped team had offered signs in recent outings that they were coming into form notwithstanding the leaking of goals against moderate opponents in the Leinster championship. They still won those matches against Westmeath and Offaly convincingly, having earlier run riot against Dublin in the relegation play-off replay. In reality, Galway were starting to build up a head of steam, but few people paid little attention to it.

Instead, nearly everybody was being carried away by Kilkenny’s form so far in 2012, but perhaps we were all guilty of reading too much into their recent big match demolitions of both Cork and Dublin, two teams who are nearly as good as they are perceived. Furthermore, Kilkenny had injury trouble, underlined by the absence of JJ Delaney and Michael Fennelly, while the fact they had already beaten Galway by a record margin of 25 points in the league must have disarmed them somewhat in the build up to the Leinster final.

For all that, Galway still had to go out and carry the battle to a side which had an aura of invincibility about them again. That sometimes is easier said than done, but Fergal Moore and company were primed for battle as they established a scarcely believable advantage of 2-11 to 0-1 by the 30th minute. In a nutshell, Galway were magnificent. Forcing the pace with a high intensity display and tactically outsmarting Kilkenny by crowding the general midfield sector, it was all one way traffic as the champions’ isolated defenders were left chasing shadows.

For more, read this week's Connacht Tribune.