Footballers need to regroup for visit of Galway
A whopping 50 years ago, this hairier-than-now and smarter-than-now scribe was about to sit the Leaving Certificate, and my favourite subject was Latin.
Accordingly, the small matter of a half-century brain decay apart, I am disappointed that I can’t recall the Latin for ‘weekend’, and I won’t cheat by asking our collective best friend, a man unheard of in 1973 (and maybe we were better off in our innocence), Mr Google.
Therefore, I will merely expand on the late Queen Elizabeth II’s infamous ‘annus horribilis’ by mixing languages and referring to Saturday, May 27, and Sunday, May 28, 2023 as a ‘weekend horribilis’ for this Westmeath fanatic (and I was that even a decade before 1973)!
Indeed, winding back the aforementioned decade to 1963, when my boyhood heroes lost the All-Ireland minor football final to Kerry, it was a year that came up at the funeral Mass in Kilmacud last Wednesday of Mullingar native, 92-year-old Frank Wallace RIP, who left the Bracklyn Dairy in town that year to set up his own (thankfully successful) grocery business in Dublin with his wife of 53 years, Ita (nee Pidgeon) RIP.
A proud holder of a Westmeath junior football medal with Multyfarnham in 1956 (the year yours truly was born to a Mullingar father and Multyfarnham mother) and a granduncle of Dublin star Con O’Callaghan, Frank never lost his love of the maroon and white jersey. Indeed, his neighbour’s delightful church eulogy referenced how proud Frank would have been of the Westmeath hurlers’ sensational win in Wexford three days earlier.
Sadly, seven days later, said hurlers slipped through the Bob O’Keeffe Cup trapdoor and will ply their trade in the less glamorous, but very hard-to-win, Joe McDonagh Cup in 2024. Joe Fortune’s men were comprehensively outplayed in the second half by Antrim in last Sunday’s do-or-die game in TEG Cusack Park. Yes, the memories of Chadwick’s Wexford Park on May 21, 2023, will be treasured by those of us fortunate to have been present until we follow Frank Wallace’s sad last journey, but it was upsetting to see an error-ridden display confirm Westmeath's destination for next year.
However, to paraphrase another Westmeath native back in 1990 (and Donal Óg Cusack has made us all conscious to be exact with our quotations!), “on mature reflection and recollection”, the Lake County finished their five-game stint in this year’s Leinster championship with a scoring difference of minus 80, and they only scored 0-7 v Kilkenny, against whom Wexford scored 4-23 two days ago. Frankly, Westmeath can have no complaints.
The most horribilis thing about last weekend was the footballers’ snatching defeat from the jaws of victory in Armagh. It made for a long and silent journey home, with even the most biased orange and white-clad fan conceding that the visitors had let Kieran McGeeney’s charges out of jail. Producing their best 70-minute plus performance of 2023, Dessie Dolan’s troops should, at the very least, have secured a precious Sam Maguire Cup point to keep them firmly in contention for the knockout stages.
Four points up at one stage and with the massive home crowd stunned, Westmeath ultimately lost by the narrowest of margins. After recent league and championship defeats to Down and Louth, having led by seven and eight points respectively, it was galling to see another glorious opportunity spurned at an even higher level of the game.
However, unlike the hurlers, the good news is there are two further opportunities for a talented team to lay down a marker, albeit it doesn’t get much more difficult than facing last year’s All-Ireland finalists and the previous year’s Sam Maguire Cup champions in the guaranteed remaining two matches.
First up is the visit of Galway to TEG Cusack Park next Saturday (throw-in 5pm). Legendary player-turned-manager Padraic Joyce was an interested spectator in the resplendent BOX-IT Athletic Grounds (as, incidentally, were Tyrone's Brian Dooher and Feargal Logan). The upshot of this is that any shreds of complacency in the Tribesmen’s ranks will undoubtedly have been erased after witnessing the Lake County’s generally outstanding performance.
Daft as this may have sounded this time last week, a replication of the best parts (almost everything) on show in Armagh could see the two maroon and white-wearers (they both won't be on Saturday) produce a ding-dong battle which could preserve the home team’s chance of an extended summer. Dolan’s subs’ policy has been questioned in recent weeks, and let’s hope this vital strategy is got right in a few days from now.
Many of us who made the awkward Saturday evening journey to Salthill almost 17 years ago will recall the euphoria of a seismic win by Tomás Ó Flatharta’s men in a fourth round qualifier. Both of this Saturday’s opposing managers played in that memorable game and will clearly remember it for different reasons, as will Dolan’s current right-hand man John Keane, and his brother Gary who scored the match-winning goal on that balmy evening. For many of us, Gary Connaughton’s ‘challenge’ on Ja Fallon remains a highlight. Suffice it to say that Armagh’s winning goal on Saturday may not have happened had the Tubberclair maestro been wearing the culbáire’s jersey!
For the record, the details follow:
29/7/2006, Galway, Westmeath 1-8 Galway 0-10
Westmeath: Gary Connaughton; Damien Healy, John Keane, Frank Boyle; Michael Ennis, Donal O’Donoghue, Gary Glennon (0-1); David Duffy, Paul Bannon; Derek Heavin, Gary Dolan (1-1), Alan Mangan (0-1); James Durkan, Denis Glennon (0-2), Dessie Dolan (0-3). Subs: John Connellan for Durkan, David O’Shaughnessy for Duffy, Paddy Martin for Connellan, Brendan Nannery for Heavin.
Galway: Alan Keane; Kieran Fitzgerald, Finian Hanley, Damien Burke; Declan Meehan (0-1), Diarmaid Blake, Gary Sice; Barry Cullinane, Joe Bergin (0-1); Matthew Clancy, Paul Clancy, Michael Donnellan (0-1); Michael Meehan (0-4), Padraic Joyce (0-1), Ja Fallon. Subs: Cormac Bane (0-2) for Fallon, Niall Coleman for P Clancy, Fiachra Breathnach for M Meehan.