Scoring prodigy has youth on his side

Galway Player Ger Farragher: In Galway this week, there is a shortage of replica hurling shirts, let alone tickets. Over the last fortnight, the county has rediscovered hurling fever reminiscent of a time many of the present team are too young to remember with any great clarity.

Ger Farragher can be counted among that group. He was five years old when the present manager, Conor Hayes, became the last man to lift the MacCarthy Cup for Galway.

Learning his craft with Castlegar, Farragher became another in the enviable line of prodigious sensations Galway hurling seems capable of producing, and just as predictably, that underage promise took a while to manifest itself at senior level.

As Hayes remarked this week, it is only now, when he is 22 years of age, that people are beginning to see the best of Farragher. But as he prepared for his first senior final with Galway, Farragher acknowledged the value of starring in the county's underage hothouse programme.

"Well, with the minor experience, it stood to us to be out there and playing in Croke Park and I found that against Tipperary. But it is a step up. The speed at senior is twice or three times faster than minor.

"From my own point of view, it has just been a matter of trying to do the simple things. A lot of our scores have come from frees - like Damien Hayes would win a power of frees and the other forwards are working hard and, thankfully for me, the frees are going over. We are not worrying too much: we just want to play the way we are playing and hope that it keeps working."

Farragher was drafted into the Galway panel a season before but, young and frustrated with the lack of playing opportunities, he opted to leave again. That tendency to enter and drift away from the county scene was a common theme and heightened the frustration of Galway hurling people. They had seen the player deliver as a minor and could not understand why his talents were not being harnessed at senior level, where the need was greater.

Since returning, though, Farragher has locked down a place in the team, his dependable dead-ball striking and mature forward play being the most impressive features of his game. But like the rest of a predominantly young team, he was this week trying to come to terms with the dramatic wave of popularity the team have surfed since their epic semi-final win over Kilkenny.

"Everyone was going on about it all right," he acknowledged sombrely at the press evening in Pearse Stadium. "And you'd be reading about it in the papers and what not. Because Kilkenny have been the kingpins of hurling for so long, there was bound to be an interest.

"But we were just told to forget about it afterwards and to concentrate on Cork. We will just keep on doing what we are doing."

It must have been a strange sensation for Farragher and his teammates, fielding questions from Rebel county journalists while signing autographs for a generation of local kids overwhelmed by the sudden deliverance of excitement by this team. Many counties might have opted to keep a player as young as Farragher out of the spotlight but in keeping with Hayes's laissez-faire attitude, Farragher was happy to field potentially dangerous questions and take the sting out of them.

"Cork are red-hot favourites now. The backs has been their strong point and with Tom Kenny and Ben O'Connor in midfield, that is where their games have been won. Any lad you're going to come up against will be good at this stage. Ah, I wouldn't say we worry about that. We've been going well at training and I can't see why we can't play well again."

He does seem remarkably unfazed by what is to come and is consistent with the rest of the Galway panel and management in his reasoning as to what has changed. The main change, he argues, has been structural.

"The three games brought us on a fierce lot. We are thankful of it anyhow. Limerick was a tough game. We were six points up, they came back and went a point up and then we came back, so it set us up.

"Against Tipperary, the same thing happened. The spaces opened up for us and it's bit of luck - we got some breaks that day we wouldn't normally get.

"And against Kilkenny we just kept battling. That's what we'll do the next day as well. I don't think we will change anything for Cork."