GALWAY  1-11                

ROSCOMMON 0-14

By Kevin Egan at Tuam Stadium

GALWAY’S hopes of knockout football in the Connacht U-20 championship hang by a frail and frayed thread this week, after they failed to beat Roscommon in Tuam Stadium last Wednesday evening.

Previous defeats to Mayo and Sligo left the equation very simple for Derek Savage and his players. Win this game and they would contest a championship semi-final, any less and they would need divine intervention from elsewhere.

Elsewhere is now Leitrim, as the only way forward for Galway was for the province’s footballing minnows to overcome Roscommon at Dr. Hyde Park last night (Wednesday); a big ask for a team that is now formally eliminated from contention, even if they showed plenty of attacking panache in scoring 2-22 in their defeat to Sligo at Drumshanbo last week.

As post-mortem examinations go, no-one will have to dig a scalpel deep into the cadaver to figure out a cause of death from this game. Savage said afterwards that his charges had enough chances to win three games, but a shockingly poor conversion rate meant that they left a world of scores behind them.

Eleven wides tells a fraction of the story, but there was so much more to it than just that bare statistic. In the first half, Galway played into a breeze that was far more influential than it might have seemed to anyone who watched the game from the shelter of the stand, or even from home on TG4’s live stream.

That encouraged a hard-running game, and Galway delivered this. Seán Dunne, Jack Lonergan and Cian Marks all carried the ball hard and direct at the Roscommon defence, but the real weapon was Seán O’Connor at wing-back, who seemed to be able to leave two and three defenders trailing in his wake every time he got up a head of steam.

The Maigh Cuilinn player first exploded through the cover in the opening minute, only to see his low shot smothered by Patrick Gaynor in the Roscommon goal. In this instance however the ball broke loose for Mikey Mulryan to finish to the net, so no harm done.

After that O’Connor broke through three more times, having one shot cleared off the line by Eoghan Carthy, fizzing another inches wide of the far right-hand post, and then getting tripped to the ground inside the 20m line, with Roscommon extremely fortunate not to receive a black card.

Pictured: Galway’s Ross Coen getting the better of Roscommon’s Cathal McKeon during the Connacht U-20 Football Championship group tie at Tuam Stadium last Wednesday. Photo: Joe O’Shaughnessy.