Galway 2-20

Sligo 0-12

Pádraic Ó Ciardha at MacHale Park

IF you wanted to sum up Galway’s performance in Sunday’s Connacht Final in a word, it would be ‘clinical’. Two words? ‘Really clinical’. Whether you need any more than that is debatable but there’s space to fill and let’s enjoy this while it lasts.

The 14-point win over Sligo in Castlebar won’t go down as a classic but that’s no reason why it shouldn’t leave Galway supporters with a spring in their step this week. It’s been 20 years since the Tribesmen managed to retain a Connacht title and the fact that Pádraic Joyce’s side managed the feat at their leisure at the weekend is a very good sign of where Galway are at at the minute, even if it was against a Division 4 team.

A quick start from Sligo, as they raced into a two point lead, might have given Joyce and the rest cause for concern but Galway were back on track soon enough and, really from the moment Matthew Tierney blasted to the roof of the net in the tenth minute for the game’s first goal, both he and Galway never looked back. The lead was 2-7 to 0-5 by half-time after Damien Comer and Tierney combined again for Galway’s second goal and they extended their lead steadily in the second half.

It was a brilliant day for Tierney, in particular, who finished up with a tally of 2-7, with all but two points of that coming from play. While his two goals came from a combined distance of about six yards, the Oughterard man had plenty of work to do with both chances but finished expertly. Sunday’s all-action display has only strengthened his case for being Galway’s player of the year to date and if Tierney carries this form into the round-robin series, it’ll be a huge bonus.

You could find very little to fault any of those in a Galway jersey on Sunday, really. Shane Walsh’s subdued display which saw him taken off after 40 minutes certainly raised eyebrows but with Joyce explaining afterwards that Walsh had been bedridden with flu during the week, it makes his underperformance wholly understandable.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.

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