Ciarán Murphy: Momentum a major asset in GAA season

Right now, the one thing you’re looking for as a GAA team is momentum. If you’ve gotten to this stage of the summer and you’re still alive, that’s one thing. But to have gotten this far, with a couple of defining wins under your belt, with an idea that you’re growing and going somewhere, that is the real rocket fuel for your season.

Momentum, in a strange kind of way, used to be the sole preserve of teams bursting through the qualifiers. You may have missed out on your provincial title, but here was a chance to roll the dice, play a few games, and discover some home truths about yourselves.

The replays they’ve been forced to play and win in recent weeks have obviously played a part, but Tyrone and Galway have managed to get the best of both worlds – silverware and a steady run of games.

Tyrone were always going to have a say in this year’s championship, but over the course of the last four weeks they’ve been caught out by Cavan, tweaked some things and then hammered Cavan, and taken down their white whale in the Ulster final.

In that same time period, Galway have played three games against Division One opposition, and have gone from no-hopers to provincial champions. Going back to Castlebar last Sunday, they seemed like a different team from the one that took the field against Mayo on June 18th.

Angry place

That performance against Mayo came from an angry place – anger at the media, anger at their fellow county-men who decided not to join up with the panel . . . anger, most importantly, at a state of affairs that had a Mayo six-in-a-row in Connacht as a done deal before a ball had been kicked.

All that manifested itself in a Galway display that was built on extraordinary application, will to win, and defensive solidity.

That was enough that day but it was a unique set of circumstances. Was that any guarantee of a future performance? The last two weeks have been about franking that performance, and they have done that pretty impressively.

Once Danny Cummins’s goal in the first half nestled in the bottom corner of the Roscommon net last Sunday, Galway took flight.

As a three point lead became six, and then 10, you realised that this is it – this is what these guys train for. To be asked the question ‘are you good enough?’, and luxuriate in the affirmative answer when it arrives.

For too many counties, the championship is a depressing hospital-room movie scene that has no pre-death moment of enlightenment. No death-bed pearls of wisdom, just a weary expiration croak in Tullamore or Thurles or Cavan or Carlow.

Lenin once said: “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”

There has been cause to use his quote a few times in the last few months in rather more weighty discussions than this.

But too often in the GAA, whole generations of players go through the intercounty meat grinder without ever really knowing whether they belong at this level of sporting endeavour.

After one season in the Premier League, a man can say definitively that he has either succeeded or failed in a fair, eight-month, 38-game survey of his abilities. A GAA player might play five or six championship games in three years – how can he draw a line from one game to the next in that sequence and say that, having given it a fair shot, I either belong at this level or I don’t?

The Galway footballers (and the Clare footballers, too) are now finding out what their level is, and are aiming now at the level above. That’s what sport’s about, in essence.

Momentum is an even more elusive resource in our hurling championship. There are six teams left, and while the two provincial winners haven’t lost all summer, just ask Tipperary how difficult they’ve found it in recent years to raise their game for an All-Ireland semi-final after five weeks off.

Clare and Wexford have won a few games in recent weeks, but Galway and Waterford are coming off the back of hugely damaging psychological defeats. This weekend will tell us whether Clare and Wexford have given themselves enough of a head start over their opponents.

Everyone groaned when Congress refused to take action this spring to limit the number of replays in the provincial championships but in the absence of a willingness to tackle the substantive illness at the heart of our championship structure, replays have helped Tyrone and Galway find out quite a bit about themselves, and kept them busy.

As for our other two provincial football winners? Kerry and Dublin know, as they’ve always known, that their summer starts here. Their challenge is to build up a head of steam from a standing start.