Galway’s Pádraic Mannion not beating himself up over his part in Kilkenny’s late winner

A warm Tuesday in Waterford, and while De La Salle GAA club volunteers enthusiastically scamper about making sure several of the country’s most talented hurlers are sufficiently fed and watered during the launch of the 2023 All-Ireland SHC, Pádraic Mannion finds himself talking football. Kind of.

Not that he is surprised to be, at the same time. He hasn’t exactly spent the last couple of days stewing over the final moments of Sunday’s Leinster senior hurling final, but Mannion knew he wouldn’t get out of Waterford without giving his perspective on how events played out at Croke Park.

In those frantic seconds deep in injury-time, after an endless rolling ruck for possession, the sliotar popped out in front of the Galway defender, who during the scramble had lost his hurl. In an attempt to clear the danger, Mannion put his boot through the ball, but like a magnet tossed at a fridge it landed in Cillian Buckley’s grasp on the edge of the square. Goal.

As the messy battle for the sliotar had played out in the corner, Mannion remembers marshalling Eoin Cody. Then, when John Donnelly tapped the ball across towards the central channel, Mannion and Cody reacted simultaneously.

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“The two of us contested it,” recalls Mannion. “My hurl was kind of in front of me and just whatever way we collided, maybe my hands were probably a bit sweaty and greasy as well because it was so warm, it just slid out of my hand.

“Just as the ball came in, it hit my hand, I could have got it. It popped out of my hand, all the small things, sure you could drive yourself mad thinking about them all. Just a freak.”

With no hurl in his hand and an army of Kilkenny hurlers closing in over his shoulder, Mannion tried to kick the ball as far away from the Galway goal as possible.

“I could see a Kilkenny player in my left eyeline and I didn’t really want to kick it towards him, so I just said I would kick it as far as I could,” he adds.

“I couldn’t have connected any nicer with it and put it straight in Cillian Buckley’s hands. If I had scuffed it, maybe they wouldn’t have got a goal. But that’s it like, I am old enough now to be able to take it and put a positive spin on it nearly to go again.”

Mannion, 30, didn’t avoid the incident afterwards, but rather he watched it back on the Galway team bus as it headed west on Sunday evening. Even with the benefit of hindsight, and given the situation, the three-time All Star still feels he might have taken the same approach to clear his lines.

He had spotted Buckley ambling forward during the early phase of the play, when the sliotar was bogged down in the corner.

“But when the ball came out, I don’t know, I probably didn’t know that he was still there,” says Mannion.

“I watched it back because I was thinking I had made a terrible error kicking it, but then looking back I probably wouldn’t change a whole lot about it either.

“If I tried to flick it up and lost it, you’d be saying the same thing. That’s the way it is, such fine margins. Ifs and buts, you just have to move on and try get ready for the next day.”

Mannion made his senior debut in 2015 and while a less experienced player might allow such an incident swallow him up for the remainder of the campaign, he has no intention of letting the Leinster final define his summer.

“If I was younger I would say it would probably affect me more, whereas now I am nearly one of the older players in experience,” explains Mannion.

“I have nearly already shifted my focus to getting back training and getting back to the quarter-finals.”

The challenge for Galway now is to regroup and refocus their energy on the All-Ireland series. And while outside the camp, Sunday’s failure to get over the line will feed a narrative that Galway just don’t have the stuff to go all the way, inside Henry Shefflin’s dressingroom the players are determined to make an impact in the race for Liam MacCarthy.

Galway have won just three Leinster senior hurling titles – the last of which was in 2018. Their most recent All-Ireland win was in 2017, which was also the year Mannion won the first of his three All Stars.

“It’s only natural to be disappointed for a day or two,” continues Mannion. “Everybody is going to be different.

“I am just talking about myself now, I am kind of moving on. I know there are other lads might take a few days longer, but ultimately we are still in the championship. It’s not the end of the world.

“We lost a game that we were in a position to win but the flip side of it is we showed huge resilience, huge character to come back, to claw it back against Kilkenny, who are a really tough team to play against. It’s not all doom and gloom either. We are lucky to be still there.

“We are training tonight, lads will be chatting about it. We have all lost games before, nobody died. Get on with it and just go again.”