Ciarán Murphy: Apathy draining the life from Galway football

This should be a week of fevered football conversation in my home county of Galway. It’s the sort of week around which the GAA world revolves – a match with your local rivals coming up, a team announcement on Wednesday morning to get your teeth into, a debate about tickets, lifts to the game, a venue for a pre-match drink perhaps.

But having talked to a few of my friends at home, the county is wrapped in a funereal gloom.

The Euros are stealing some of the limelight for sure, Connacht Rugby’s success is still casting a glow and the hurlers are in action on Sunday, all of which might siphon attention away from what was once and may well be again our flagship sporting tea. But the silence ahead of Galway v Mayo, in Castlebar this Saturday evening, is deafening.

As one man in Tuam (they might as well put “the spiritual home of Galway football” on the sign outside the town, given how often it’s described as such) put it – “if you ask anyone, even in this town, how you think we’ll do this year in the championship, they’ll presume you’re talking about the hurling.”

That's a damning, depressing thought. An organisation can deal with a lot of things, but apathy is a difficult poison to eradicate. And the apathy around this team is almost all-encompassing . . . unfortunately, that also includes some of the best footballers in the county. Manager Kevin Walsh said last month that 52 players have turned down the chance to come in and train with him since he took over 18 months ago.

The gauntlet

In the last five years, Mayo have thrown down the gauntlet, and Galway haven’t even cleared their throat in response. In that time, Mayo have poured massive resources into training and preparation. The county board, despite crippling debts incurred in the redevelopment of MacHale Park, found the money from somewhere.

James Horan may not have had the best relationship with the county board, but he had the players on-board from Day One.

Horan sold them all (players, fans, officials) a dream, and they bought it. For whatever reason, successive Galway managers haven’t been able to sell the dream.

If you go back to 2009, the best 15 players available to Galway were more or less there. Taking into account the massive sacrifices they have made, and cognisant of the fact that they’re the people who have put their hand up and were willing to make that sacrifice, the 15 named this week by Kevin Walsh are not the 15 best players in the county.

Alternative team

An alternative team, taken from those 52 who said “thanks, but no thanks” to Walsh over the course of the 18 months he’s been in the job would have an excellent chance of winning a match between the two.

On a macro level, it seems like a travesty. But each of those 52 players had a reason for turning down the chance to play, however badly that might sting people who still hold the idea of being ‘a county man’ as the pinnacle of one’s sporting career.

If we can all agree the demands on our intercounty players are unreasonable, is it not unfair to then turn around and ask people why they’re not willing to be treated unreasonably?

So to the list of things we ask our intercounty managers to do, we can now add “convincing people to do things they don’t really want to do”.

At the top level, that takes a certain kind of man – a James Horan, or a Jim McGuinness.

But it’s seldom a linear problem, to be fixed in a linear fashion. Do you focus your attention on getting the players onside first? Or do you focus on getting the money together, through the county board or through supporters clubs or rich beneficiaries or local businesses, to impress on the players who are prevaricating that the sacrifices will be worth it?

The answer is – you have to do both, simultaneously, and perhaps be economical with the truth to both sides equally.

Other counties have been able to sell that dream to enough of their best players to be successful. And it shouldn’t necessarily be the hardest sell in the world in Galway.

I would wager there’s a good proportion of those 52 players currently choosing to be outside the camp that have either All-Ireland minor or U-21 medals in their back pockets.

I realise I’m sitting here demanding that Galway find and hire a charismatic, business-savvy, cold-blooded, ruthless, tactically brilliant manager . . . and they don’t exactly grow on trees. Kevin Walsh is about as respected a figure in Galway football as there is. If he can’t do it, then maybe there’s an attitudinal problem in the county that is beyond the powers of even a messiah figure to fix.

More intimidating

But Mayo found their man in October 2010, and the gap looks more and more intimidating with every passing year. The further ahead they are in terms of preparation and physical conditioning, the less enticing a prospect it is for a young Galway footballer to put in the effort to start to claw back some ground.

But it has to start somewhere, and relying on Mayo to come back to the pack seems like a forlorn hope at the moment.