UNTOUCHABLE TRIBE
Top class Galway relieve Wexford of their Leinster crown
THIS winter All-Ireland championship is nothing if not different. When the founding fathers of the association met in Hayes’ Hotel back in 1884, they hardly imagined the game in this way.
An evening throw-in under floodlights, yellow sliotars the order of the day. A behind-closed-doors setting that meant the 82,300 capacity of Croke Park was reduced to just the match substitutes sitting in the stand, a Bloody Sunday banner draped across the width of Hill 16 to remind of another important anniversary 100 years on.
As Wexford and Galway went through the warm-up just after 6pm, Halloween fireworks lit up the backdrop to the Cusack Stand for this novel winter double bill of Leinster hurling semi-final action.
If the curtain-raiser between Kilkenny and Dublin went from noncontest to an edge-of-seat thriller in the space of the second half as the latter chased down a 15-point deficit to fall just a point short in injury time, this one finished without anything like the same drama.
Wexford, reigning Leinster champions, were comprehensively outplayed by a Galway team who performed like they had been playing all summer rather than being in enforced lockdown for the past six months.
They were all movement and fluid stick passing, picking off quickfire points with ease, Brian Concannon and Conor Whelan proving so elusive and so classy, Joe Canning banging over placed balls for fun, their superiority such that cornerback Sean Loftus was even getting in on the act with two points from play.
It’s rare that Wexford’s possession game was so ruthlessly dismantled at source, Galway playing with a lot of the same verve that characterised their All-Ireland winning campaign of 2017.
Manager Shane O’Neill will be so happy with so many elements of their play in his first disrupted season in charge, particularly the way they bossed the game pretty much from start to finish.
The winners meet Kilkenny in the final on Saturday, November 14, under floodlights with a 6.15pm throw-in.
This was one of those games of so many moving parts that positions were rendered pretty much meaningless.
Wexford packed the middle third with bodies and tried to play their counter-attacking running game while Galway stuck to their man-toman match ups for the most part which meant that the likes of Loftus was able to pop up far enough up the field to score, while Canning was last man back at another stage as he picked up possession on the edge of his own D.
Level at the first water break at 0-7 apiece, a second-quarter run of scoring by Galway broke the game open.
Happy to press up and stop Wexford’s running game in the midfield battle zone, Fintan Burke became the second defender to find
space to thump over a super score. Whelan and Concannon picked off another couple of quality scores and Canning tried to catch the Wexford defence off guard from a 20-metre free, his dipping shot just cleared off the line.
Galway’s goal came on the halfhour mark when a long-range free from the same player dropped on the edge of the square and broke off Whelan for Concannon to slide and pull to the net.
That Wexford centre-back Matthew O’Hanlon had his team’s best goalscoring chance – his late run from deep picked out only for
Eanna Murphy to make the save – said everything about the constant positional rotations. Galway were full value for their 1-13 to 0-10 half-time lead and by the 48th minute had eased nine clear, 1-19 to 0-13, continuing their series of classy points, with Jason Flynn, Johnny Coen and Cathal Mannion following the lead of Whelan and Concannon who were both razor sharp.
The lack of fans meant that you could hear Davy Fitzgerald imploring his players, loudly questioning a few of Colm Lyons’ calls and summing up the sense of
frustration as the match seemed to be slipping away. Lee Chin was trying his hardest to keep Wexford in touch, from play and from placed balls, but they were eight down after the second water break and heading into the final quarter.
When Galway hit another three on the bounce, the pick a throwback sideline cut from Canning, this was done as a contest.
Mark Fanning had a 20-metre free saved by his opposite number but the game finished as it started with Whelan putting over a serious score from play.
Afterwards, Wexford manager Fitzgerald issued an apology to the Wexford people for the listless nature of the performance. ‘I absolutely adore them lads, I’ve unbelievable time for them, but that’s not acceptable what we did tonight. You feel that sick in your stomach it’s incredible.
‘I can get over being beaten but we’re better than that. A lot better than that.
‘It’s important we hurt after this. It’s one of the worst feelings you can have.
‘We’ve over 50 games since I’ve come here and we’ve won the majority of them. ‘This probably hurts as much as any of them. Defeat doesn’t bother me. But, by Jesus, you fight until you drop. And it didn’t happen for us in this game.’