Galway's quick kill brings Wexford back to earth

Wexford 0-17

THEY’RE getting better. That’s the undeniable conclusion from the events at Wexford Park on Saturday evening. We came expecting a tight struggle for supremacy only for the All-Ireland champions to turn the match into something of a rout.

Galway had this Leinster championship round-robin clash virtually won before Wexford even knew what had hit them. All the home team’s carefully planned tactically strategies blown apart in a disastrous start which left them trailing by 1-1 after barely 100 seconds of action.

As a consequence, it meant Wexford never got to play the game on their own terms, instead trying unsuccessfully to play catch up on an evening when key players such as Diarmuid O’Keeffe, Lee Chin, Jack O’Connor and Conor McDonald made little or no impact.

The reality is that a fiercely committed Galway didn’t let them. Their players were hungrier, sharper and swifter in comfortably emulating last year’s Leinster final nine-point defeat of the same opposition. Wexford were harried into submission and, by the end, many of their players appeared broken by the Tribesmen’s overwhelming mix of physicality, intensity and pure skill.

Full report in this week's Connacht Tribune.