Memories of spring's great aria revived

The league meeting between Galway and Tyrone in 2004 heralded a changing of the guard, writes KEITH DUGGAN

BY THE time the first match had ended, those applauding in Healy Park, Omagh, could have been forgiven for checking their calendars. This was April 18th, 2004, but the National League semi-final match that they had just witnessed seemed to belong to a hotter month.

Galway and Tyrone had thundered into one another and managed 1-12 apiece after normal time and then another four points each in the extra period. Galway lost Pádraic Joyce during that period after he was booked for a second yellow card and he flung his gloves disdainfully onto the field as he departed.

Tyrone concocted a thrilling equalising point from a young Colm McCullough and then Kevin Hughes was shown a second yellow card seconds before the final whistle, as if to leave the drama perfectly poised. The players bundled down the tunnel, spent and exchanging mutinous words down the corridor as they entered the dressingroom. The crowd considered the ramifications of the result. They would have to go to Salthill and do it all again a week later.

But nobody minded because the verdict was unanimous. The match had been brilliant.

“We were very keen to win a league title,” Pete Warren, a selector for John O’Mahony with Galway recalls. “Galway hadn’t won a league title in I don’t know how many years [it was 1981] and we were desperate to win one at that stage; the idea of winning a league was special to us. But we were also very keen to win that particular game because we felt that it would be of benefit to us when it came to the championship.”

It was easy to see why. The meeting of Galway and Tyrone at that time seemed like a perfect collision of old and new. The maroon county’s return to prominence had been sumptuous to watch, with O’Mahony’s calm efficiency on the sideline a perfect foil to the extravagant openness with which they played the game. The emergence of Tyrone under Mickey Harte was the second installation of an Ulster renaissance, as they relieved their neighbours Armagh of the All-Ireland championship in a September derby that was observed with dismay by traditionalists. Tyrone were the reigning All-Ireland champions and had won the league for the previous two years.

But this was the first time that their paths had crossed and it made for an intriguing clash of styles. A few days before the first match, Mickey Harte doffed his cap to the west when he said: “I always admired the way Galway played. I think what they showed in winning their All-Irelands was how best to mix the long and the short games.”

O’Mahony, for his part, admitted the emergence of Tyrone had raised question marks about the ability of Galway to maintain their carefree philosophy. “What happens on Sunday will I suppose, have some influence on how we play the game and will have to take it into account when we sit down and look ahead to the championship.”

By the following week, however, the mood was testier. Harte, questioned by reporters after the drawn match, said he felt the Galway men had influenced the referee in not allowing Mark Harte to take a free at the very end of the match. O’Mahony rejected the assertion when invited to by reporters, saying he objected to “any manager pointing the finger at his players”.

It set the scene for a blistering return leg.

In retrospect, both teams were in a strange place during that spring. Tyrone were still coping with the tragic death of Cormac McAnallen less than two months earlier. “Feeling the way through the dark,” as Mickey Harte put it. Football was a welcome distraction and the spiciness of this unexpected series with Galway at least enabled them to recognise themselves again.

Galway, for their part, were trying to assure themselves that they still had a firm grip on the destination of the forthcoming All-Ireland series. Since they strolled through the All-Ireland final of 2001, they had lost out in a classic quarter-final to Kerry and a nail-biting replay to Donegal, but they still had reason to feel they could cut it with the best.

Their calibre was beyond question, even if they had lost central figures in Kevin Walsh and Tomás Mannion: now, the versatile Paul Clancy had been repositioned at centre-half back and Michael Donnellan was also filling in gaps as required.

The replay in Salthill took place just a fortnight before Tyrone were due to open the defence of their Ulster title. The predictions that their interest in the replay would be tempered by that fact seemed accurate. In Omagh, Tyrone had begun the match in irrepressible fashion, stinging Galway for 1-3 but now they found themselves trailing by eight points at the break.

The easy thing to do would have been to write it off, play it out and forget all about it. But there was something about this game. The players were caught up in it and even in the lopsided first half little sparring matches were opening up all over the field. Clancy was marking Brian McGuigan that day. A few weeks later, Clancy would recall a point that the Ardboe man had landed in the drawn match, when he ghosted into space and cracked a score with the outside of this boot. “It was a hell of a score,” Clancy said. “Not that I was going to tell him that.”

In the return match, one of Clancy’s few errors was to plant a pass directly into McGuigan’s hands. A few minutes later, when play had cleared to the other end, McGuigan grinned at him and said: “Could you not see I was wearing a white jersey.”

For Galway, the match was a test that they could play football impervious to systems or defensive cover and in front of a jubilant home crowd, they put on a show. As Seán Moran put it – under a headline “This one will live in the memory”: “A boutique of designer points whipped off the rails as Galway cut loose.” The class of 2001 was in vintage form: 1-6 for Pádraic Joyce, 1-2 for Donnellan and 0-3 for Tommy Joyce, the architect in chief that day.

It seemed to be proof that all was good. Except that then Tyrone got into the spirit of things and began to demonstrate the essential component of their game that was rarely credited then: they, too, had beautiful ball players. They just got motoring, clipped a few points, Enda McGinley snuck a goal, Brian Dooher went to town and before they knew it, Galway were scrapping just to stay in the contest. The last 10 minutes were pugilistic, with classic points instead of punches and nobody was surprised when it went to extra time again. For another half hour the sniping continued and it fell to Nicky Joyce, then a young substitute, and his cousin Tommy to land the crucial scores for Galway. It finished 2-18 to 1-19.

Both sides had reason to be happy. Tyrone could prepare for Ulster with the benefit of two absorbing, high-quality matches. And for Galway, the series had been a vindication that their way – scoring more than the others – still worked. They couldn’t have known then that the afternoon marked the last high point of the O’Mahony era.

“You wouldn’t have believed it that day, it’s true,” Warren says. “We had our good years where we were kind of dominating. And Tyrone was a team that was just arriving at that level. Galway had been there for a few years and yeah, it made for a tremendous game. It was October of 1997 when we took over the team and we put a new panel together along with existing players and it was the start of a fantastic era for Galway football.

“You know, winning the All-Ireland in 1998, losing an All-Ireland final replay to Kerry, the first team to win the All-Ireland through the back door in 2001. So by 2004, it had been a six-year period and it is a long time. So we probably were coming to the end of that era.”

That much was validated by the summer. Mayo knocked Galway out of the All-Ireland championship and in July the qualifying draw conspired to pair them with Tyrone yet again. The teams met on a drizzly day in Croke Park and neither side could summon up the unexpected magic of those league encounters. Tyrone won by 1-16 to 0-11.

“Sport is an emotional thing,” O’Mahony said afterwards. “You know what you want to achieve and you’ve been down the road before. I believe in these fellas. That’s it.”

In August, he stepped down after seven years in charge.

“When we played Kildare and Kerry and those teams, and even Meath in 2001, all of those teams were playing an open brand of football,” Warren says. “It was something similar to our game: the quick ball out of defence and a long ball into the forwards and have a go. It was open.

“By 2004 Tyrone had introduced a different dimension to it. They were excellent footballers and the speed of their short passing game and their quickness to close you down was something that we weren’t really used to. It was a different type of game – and I certainly wouldn’t take from Tyrone.

“If you look at what happened since, it was adapted across the country and club and intercounty level. You meet so many teams now who get players behind the ball and work hard to get it back. But it was something new to us at that time. And Tyrone didn’t allow us to play the type of football that we had done in 1998 and 2001.”

There was a curious symmetry to the way Tyrone’s 2004 season ended too.

Playing football and coping with the McAnallen tragedy was beyond the All-Ireland champions and it was Mayo, Galway’s oldest rivals, who knocked them out of the championship at the quarter-final stage. They would recover to sweep the All-Ireland championships of 2005 and 2008 but Galway are still trying to emulate the high point of the O’Mahony years.

When the teams meet in Tuam tomorrow, only a handful of the players who featured in that spring aria will remain and the game has evolved because other teams and managers took the best of what Tyrone and Galway had to offer at that time and incorporated it into new game plans.

“Over the last six or seven years, a lot of teams tried to do what Tyrone did so well,” Warren says. “Some people agreed with it and some people liked the old style football of getting the ball in as quickly as possible. That was just our style. As time went on, the game changed and it was a hard adjustment for us to make. But the funny thing is I can see now that it is beginning to change again and that a more direct brand of football is returning to football. People wise up to the short passing game as well just as they wised up to our type of game. It is all cyclical.”