Will battle-hardened Galway carry Sam west?

For all of Dublin’s dominance of the All-Ireland SFC between 2011 and 2023, any competition that come next Sunday will have had six different counties involved in the past four finals can be considered competitive.

By way of comparison, the same three teams – Leinster, Toulouse and La Rochelle – have featured in the past four finals of rugby’s European Champions Cup, while four teams – Manchester United, Manchester City, Liverpool and Chelsea – have contested the past four finals of the FA Cup which compared to the 33 teams who set out with varying Sam Maguire ambitions, has 92 automatic starters and another 637 teams trying to qualify for the first round.

Even going back to 2010 when Cork and Down made their last appearances, the fact that nine different counties have appeared in the past 15 All-Ireland finals compares favourably enough with the 13 teams who have reached Champions League finals over the same period, during which Real Madrid won all six of their appearances and Dublin all nine of their visits to the All-Ireland final.

The cynics might say money played its part in the success of both, yet an in-depth study completed earlier this year by the Cies Football Observatory (a research group within the International Centre for Sports Studies) revealed Real Madrid as only the 19th biggest spender in European club football over the past decade. There’s many a County Board treasurer might like to roll out that statistic when it comes to discussing the purse strings and the wish lists of their inter-county managers on a dark winter’s night later this year.

“Solo tenemos que ser un poco frugales,” as the Spaniard might say. We just need to be a bit frugal.

But I digress.

Adding to the sense that Gaelic football, for all its perceived ills at present, might be more competitive at All-Ireland Championship level than some people might have you believe, are the scoring averages of next Sunday’s finalists. If we are exclude their formality of visiting London in Connacht’s preliminary round this year, Galway have only scored an average of 2.25 points more per game than they have conceded over the course of those eight matches. And while their opponents, Armagh, did have 11-point wins against Fermanagh and Derry, three of the Orchard County’s other six games were stalemates at the end of normal time (including against Galway) while there was a one-point win against would-be Tailteann Cup winners Down.

Indeed it was the teams who were handing out the big beatings earlier in the summer, Kerry (Monaghan by 10 points, Meath by 15 points, Louth by 14 points) and Dublin (Meath by 16 points, Offaly by 20 points, Roscommon by 12 points, Cavan by 19 points) – what was that I said about the championship being competitive? – who paid a price when eventually encountering the better quality teams at the business end.

“That’s what I was thinking the last day playing Donegal, that we’re very battle-hardened. Armagh proved that as well when they played Kerry; they were the more battle-hardened team when the pressure came on with 10 or 15 minutes to go. We’ve had five really hard games along the way, six maybe, so we’re okay.” 

That was the assertion of Galway boss Pádraic Joyce when he met the media at Pearse Stadium last Thursday in advance of what is sixth All-Ireland SFC final to be involved in as player or manager.

“It’s way easier as a player because when you’re a player you just worry about yourself whereas in management, you have to worry about the 62 people involved in the whole squad,” admits Joyce.

“Logistically, getting everyone there, where you go, where you stay, every decision could come back down to me but we’re lucky that we have a great logistics man in Sean Rhatigan who looks after a lot of it, so between the two of us we’ll get it right,” reckons the manager who says the experience of reaching the final in 2022 is really only useful in that logistical, or administrative, sense.

“This is a completely different group. There’s 12 different lads than what was there before. It’s a different group, a different challenge, a different game. We felt we were in good shape (against Kerry) two years ago and we were okay going down the stretch but we just didn’t see the game out.” 

Adding to the intrigue of next Sunday’s final is that both teams have already faced off this summer. Indeed it will be the fourth championship clash between the teams in just three seasons. A draw against Kieran McGeeney's team in Markievicz Park in June threatened to prove particularly costly on Galway as for the second year in-a-row, it forced them into a preliminary quarter-final.

“We were 12 or 14/1 to win the All-Ireland at that stage and we’re now 5/6 favourites to win it,” observes Joyce. His team had looked in control of that game until McGeeney’s men got a late run on them. Coincidentally, it was a defeat to Armagh that had sent the Tribesmen down the exact same route 12 months earlier and on that occasion Mayo had their measure in Salthill to send the previous year’s All-Ireland finalists crashing out, so to ask whether Pádraic Joyce was worried about having to travel the same road again was a legitimate question.

“I wouldn’t say concerned, it was more that we had just made life very hard for ourselves. We seem to do that over the years, make life hard for ourselves. It was tough to take and look down the barrel at the time, you had a preliminary quarter-final and then a quarter-final to come against either Donegal, Kerry or Dublin, so it was definitely a harder task than going straight into a quarter-final.

“But look, we navigated through it. We had a tough game against Monaghan as well. All those games have stood to us.” 

The point stands then that the pool of teams who can hold realistic ambitions of competing hard for the Sam Maguire Cup is not insignificant in its depth, particularly when you consider that Derry, who had been some people’s favourites to lift the trophy this season, are not even among that group of nine to have reached the All-Ireland final since 2010 – Cork, Down, Dublin, Mayo, Donegal, Kerry, Tyrone, Galway and Armagh.

The appearance of the latter pair in this year’s final mean it’s the first time since 2010 that either one of Kerry, Dublin or Mayo are not involved – and a wonderful opportunity for either one of the finalists to lift Sam for the first time in over 20 years.

“This is our 10th championship match this year to try and win our 10th title; someone told me the other day that the 3-in-a-row team only played 11 matches to win 3-in-a-row,” remarks Pádraic Joyce.

“It is important for us. I wouldn’t say it’s do or die but once our lads go in and perform, I think that they should be okay.

“We know each other inside out. It’s going to be a battle, I don’t see anyone running away with the game, it’s going to be really, really tight. It’s going to go down the wire and I think the team that makes the least mistakes will win the game.”