Loughnane is out of line in labelling Galway ‘gutless’

GER Loughnane’s shadow hangs over Sunday’s All-Ireland hurling quarter-final between Clare and Galway in Thurles. A pundit with a track record of lowering the blade when it comes to critical assessment of individuals and teams, he went for the jugular altogether when labelling the Tribesmen as “gutless” in the wake of their Leinster final defeat to Kilkenny.

The former Clare manager has a strident personality and, in one sense, you’d admire his ability to call things as he sees them without fear or favour, but he really went too far in questioning Galway’s manliness after their loss to the Cats at Croke Park earlier this month. He didn’t hold back and basically accused the men in maroon of an abject surrender.

Considering that Loughnane was Galway boss for two years in 2007 and ’08 and worked with a few of the longer players on the current panel during that tenure, his outburst is even more incendiary. It’s like as though he’s still holding a grudge from those days over things not working out after his high profile appointment. Locals thought Loughnane was going to be the Messiah, but his two championship campaigns ended with a ten-point quarter-final defeat to Kilkenny and a somewhat humiliating loss to 14-man Cork respectively.

In the end, Loughnane got his marching papers and though subsequently he was adamant that there were no hard feelings in an interview for this newspaper ahead of the 2012 All-Ireland final, it’s almost as if he is taken some form of justification from Galway’s current struggles in accusing them of having “no guts whatsoever” after losing this year’s Leinster Final.

He didn’t spare Galway manager Micheal Donoghue either and isn’t impressed by his sideline demeanour. “Galway had a very aggressive manager in Cunningham, who was prepared to take on Brian Cody. Now they have a manager who reminds me of the Dermot Morgan character Fr Trendy from RTE in the 1980s. Donoghue comes across as an amiable curate coming into a new parish – and they’re expecting to win with him?

“Compare Donoghue’s body language on the sideline to that of Cody. You don’t need to be a genius to work out who is king of the jungle,” blasted Loughnane unfairly in his Star column on the day after the recent Leinster Final. He also said the Galway players were looking for a crutch and that the defeat to Kilkenny showed they were made of ‘absolutely nothing’. “You can forget about this Galway team. There’s always someone or something to blame. The manager, the trainer, the physio, the length of the grass on the training pitch, the weather,” he baldly stated.

By any standards, this is damning criticism. Sure, Donoghue could be a little more animated on the sideline – if only because supporters still like to see the people in charge fired-up – but Dublin’s successful football manager Jim Gavin often looks as though he watching just a game of tiddlywinks such is his relaxed gait. The merit of shouting and roaring, and running up and down the sideline remains questionable in the modern-era of such professional preparation anyway.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.