KILLINAN END - Shefflin is a perfect fit for Galway
If football decided that excitement and increased competition was just too much for it to contemplate right now at least hurling took an unexpected twist and guaranteed talking points to beat the band with the arrival of Henry Shefflin as Galway manager. David Fitzgerald had, it seems, the position snatched from his grasp at the eleventh hour. Galway are probably as well off. You would wonder what new ideas, what new energy, what new enthusiasm, can be generated by a manager who simply moves from one job to another without time to think or to consider lessons learned. You would also wonder in an amateur game where some people get the time.
Shefflin has the advantage of freshness even if he faces the inevitable dilemma of the new manager in his lack of experience at this level. His experience at club level has been pointed to in respect of experience though it is exposure of a very different variety. Ballyhale Shamrocks will shortly win a ninth Kilkenny championship in sixteen years, and will be pursuing a sixth All-Ireland title. It is by any standards a mind-boggling bank of achievement, but Shefflin’s managerial teeth were cut within a certain context. It is worth noting, however, that when he became manager Shamrocks had not been setting the world alight, but it was a team with much potential. Of course, you could argue that this scenario is exactly what he is inheriting in Galway.
There has always been a sense of Galway as under-achievers. Even on their best days there has been a view held that they should have won more and piled it on when they were going well. At the same time when you look more rigorously at the bare indicators it is not so clear that there has been quite the wealth of talent people imagine. Much of the assumption has hinged on the winning of fourteen All-Ireland Minor titles since 1983 which is not a million miles off half of all titles.
However, in the context of those apparent riches Galway’s ability to bring this through at Under-20/21 level has been poor. Just three All-Ireland titles this century is not necessarily a bad record in and of itself, but many of the performances in other years were poor with several bad beatings. It suggests we are not looking at well-oiled system for talent identification or development and from that perspective the page on which he will attempt to plot the way forward will have less dots to join than might be imagined.
That does not have to be a disadvantage of course and having some self-entitlement knocked out of player at Under-20 might not any harm. And you hardly need to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of Galway hurling to know that there is potential, if not to shoot for the stars immediately, certainly to be far better than they have been since the halcyon days of 2017. There have been several games – Leinster Final and All-Ireland semi-final drawn games of 2018 and the Leinster final of 2020 come to mind - where they failed to press home an advantage. Instilling that focus alone would bring Shefflin a fair part of the way. That said, there are other challenges - not least the stick or twist conundrum. Will he do as Liam Cahill did in Waterford and make a couple of calls to stamp his own imprint on matters?
There are several Galway players in the 28-32 bracket who might be less than imperious by the time Shefflin’s time is up. Does he stay with them and hope to wring the last juices of potential from the current crop or has he the time, confidence, and knowledge of his new terrain, to make such a cull now? Will Galway have the Burke-McInerney axis in defence over the next three years? Hardly. Players such as Conor Cooney, Joseph Cooney, the Mannion’s have a lot of hurling done while Aidan Harte is older than Joe Canning. Will he go with all of these again or gamble on new talent? This will be a significant decision.
The job is an attractive proposition purely from a competitive perspective. Wexford seems unlikely to improve soon and Kilkenny may decline further while Dublin will be seen as beatable, and probably should be for a team with Galway’s ambition. Three years with a very strong chance of taking the Leinster title in each year would probably be the optimist’s argument. That would mean an All-Ireland semi-final place potentially in each year without tearing up trees. It is a position which Shefflin found himself in many a time in his playing career and it is a prospect which certainly salves any concerns about expectations or over-stretched ambitions.
The real excitement will come when Kilkenny come out to play and one of their own is in the opponent’s corner. They are one county which has managed to avoid this scenario in recent decades, at least with a county that had a realistic prospect of beating Kilkenny. The breaking of ranks alone will generate headlines and the outcome will be box-office. It also raises questions locally in Kilkenny. With Shefflin out of the picture for three years who will succeed Cody? Is he likely to be there for three more years to allow a seamless transfer of power to man who has learned the ropes with Galway? And if he steps down, say, next year, will there be an automatic position a few years later for what it is presumed will be by then a former Galway manager? Will Shefflin emerge unscathed from the Galway experience? These essentially political questions alone make it an exciting prospect. The on-field activity will make it even better.