By Pádraic Ó Ciardha

INJURIES. Wasted chances. Lack of form. Bad luck. When it comes to the post-mortem of this particular defeat to Mayo, there’s unfortunately something for everyone who wants to have a stab at why exactly the Galway senior footballers’ season came to such a sticky end at Pearse Stadium on Sunday.

While the thought of Galway being out of the championship before the end of June seemed inconceivable as recently as a fortnight ago, once they missed out on direct passage through to the quarter-finals, there was a grim sense of foreboding that everything was suddenly about to go wrong.

As soon as Mayo were pulled out of the hat last Monday week, a knot appeared in the stomach of all but the most optimistic supporters and the doubts about the fitness of Seán Kelly, Damien Comer and Dylan McHugh only tightened that knot as the week went on.

The sight of Kelly hobbling back from the pre-match coin toss only compounded matters and when Mayo started the brighter and surged into a 0-3 to 0-1 lead after seven minutes, a Mayo win began to look inevitable.

The late introduction of Kevin McLoughlin, starting his first championship game in a year, certainly seemed to flummox Galway during those opening exchanges. The Knockmore veteran spent a lot of time around the ‘D’, as if to try and occupy and test Seán Kelly, and McLoughlin scored one and assisted another of Mayo’s opening three points.

For all the sense of dread amongst supporters at that stage, the Galway team responded brilliantly once they finally got settled and while you’d be hard-pressed to make a case that Galway deserved to win Sunday’s game, there’s absolutely no doubt that they could have and probably even should have seen it out.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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