Team boss Walsh delighted that Galway finish league campaign on a high
THE prospect of playing Division Three football really focuses the mind. Galway senior footballers, who had a great start to the National League before losing their way in the middle, came good again when it mattered most, against Roscommon and Kildare.
Relegation was a very real threat for Galway after surrendering leads in the losses to Down, Cavan and Laois, which meant the final two matches were must-win survival tests.
They passed that examination, with a satisfying six-point win over Kildare in Tuam on Sunday, which pleased manager Kevin Walsh.
“Yeah, we’re happy enough with it. It was important to finish off the league strong. You’ll have ups and downs in the middle of league but it was important to finish strong, and that’s what we’ve done,” he said.
“One thing we would have said at the start of the league was that we want to be competitive in every single game that we played in. There is no game that we got walloped in, and in fairness, all three games we lost, we probably could have won. We were competitive right through the league.”
It could have been oh so different. If the Galway versus Laois match back in February hadn’t been postponed due to snow in Tuam, a third win on the trot was looking likely, before heading away to Down, when the focus would have been on promotion rather than relegation.
It all went a bit pear-shaped with the snow rescheduling; and instead of going north to Newry with three wins, Galway had just two and they met a more settled Laois later in the campaign in the postponed match.
The defeats away to Down, when they surrendered a seven points advantage, and to Cavan, when they let slip a five points interval lead in Tuam, and then to Laois, when alarmingly they failed to score in the second half in front of an agitated home crowd, indicated Galway had lost their way. They were on a downward spiral and there were fears that that trajectory might not be rectified quickly enough.
As it happened, Galway’s final two matches proved that they learned a lot about themselves from those defeats. They bounced back from being 1-8 to 0-4 down early on against Roscommon in Hyde Park to produce a rousing comeback win, 1-14 to 1-10, revealing true character in the process.
And over the Easter weekend, when the pressure was on, Galway again displayed a steely resolve to play their way to safety against Kildare.
Galway finished mid-division but beat two of the three teams who finished above them (Meath and Roscommon), and should have defeated Down as they blew a winning hand in the closing stages.
For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.