Galway hang hat in Leinster but that doesn’t mean they call it home

There's still no sign of an All-Ireland and last autumn's turbulence – the messy coup against manager Anthony Cunningham – has left bruised sensibilities around the county and, oh yes, the team were relegated in the league, but in one respect Galway hurling hasn't known such stability for 20 years.

On Sunday they contest a fifth Leinster final. It still sounds strange that a county from the western seaboard is competing in the eastern province but this year Leinster has become the hurling equivalent of Ellis Island, welcoming emigres from everywhere – for the first time, its hurling championship actually featured counties from every province – to offer them a better life and the chance to improve themselves.

All-Ireland finals

It was in 2009 that Galway were first admitted to the Leinster championship. Since then the county has featured in two All-Ireland finals without winning either. This compares with the same number of finals during the 12 years in which qualifiers and the old ‘back door’ regime were in place.

Former Galway manager and All-Ireland-winning captain Conor Hayes was a leading advocate of the move into Leinster and, on the whole, he remains in favour.

“I think it’s been a good experience. Unless you’ve a very good team you can’t dip in and out of the championship and still manage to progress. Look at Kilkenny last year, getting to an All-Ireland final while chopping and changing the selection. You need games to be able to do that but a few years before, at their peak, the team picked itself.

“Galway haven’t been good enough to win an All-Ireland but we’ve been there or thereabouts.”

Endless quest

Galway have been central to the process of structural championship reform over the past two decades. As each feat of format engineering has taken the county farther away from its privileged quarter of a century, during which it could turn up more or less unimpeded in All-Ireland semi-finals every August, Galway have acquiesced for the good of the game as well as in the apparently endless quest to find a structure that would optimise their own chances.

Hayes remembers the old days of those August ambushes when they lay in wait for opponents, who had already attracted a certain amount of hype.

"That's what we used to capitalise on when we played provincial champions – Munster especially. There was such hype when a team won the Munster championship – you know, 'the greatest championship of them all, better than the All-Ireland' – that the winners were often unprepared.

“I remember players saying to me after those semi-finals, ‘we weren’t expecting a game like that’. After winning a province and certainly Munster, players would drop a bit mentally having played in such a big game and used up a fair bit of emotional energy.

“This isn’t like the 1980s. If we get to All-Ireland semi-finals, we’re there on merit. We can look at the three games we’ve played even if not all of them were particularly competitive and that gives you something to work on. You learn from the past.”

Since the old system of four provincial champions contesting the All-Ireland semi-finals was scrapped, there have been six changes of format and at times these have been driven by considerations perceived to be in Galway’s interest.

Still, direct access to the All-Ireland quarter-finals left the county short of match practice and when the qualifiers were introduced after their successful implementation in football, Galway were still disadvantaged by entering at an early stage, generally against a weak team.

In order to treat the county fairly a clunky option was devised to create a special round for the county if they somehow lost their first match, but it would be against another unranked team – and after that they were on their own.

“In my time as manager, you were waiting until May to see who you were playing,” says Hayes. “In 2004 we won the league but then the only game we had until July was against Down. After that we ended up playing Kilkenny who were on the rebound from losing a Leinster semi-final.

“If we had lost to Down ­– of course if we’d lost to Down, we wouldn’t have been let home – we would have played Dublin, who had themselves just been hammered by Kilkenny. So we went in against Kilkenny with just one game all summer. They were fired up and we would probably have lost anyway, but we weren’t prepared.”

Obvious attractions

The greater coherence to a season with a potential three matches culminating in a provincial final has obvious attractions, although the presence of Kilkenny complicates everything. Galway have played Brian Cody’s team six times in Leinster, winning one and drawing another, but have also lost twice to Dublin and drawn with Offaly.

It’s not all upside though and the refusal of Leinster counties to let Galway have some matches at home in Salthill rankles, as does the exclusion of the county’s minors and under-21s from the underage provincial championships.

Describing the latter situation as “hypocrisy”, Hayes says that the frustrations could prompt his county to re-think the move. “It’s a political matter but Galway could always decide we’ve improved enough and pull out of Leinster, which would leave a fairly barren championship.”

Direct access

Hurling's lonely status in the west has always exercised minds in the GAA. For a spell in the 1950s, the Munster and Leinster champions played each other in All-Ireland semi-finals, allowing Galway direct access to the final in 1955 and '58 when they were beaten by Wexford and Tipperary.

For 11 years from 1959, Galway were subsumed into the Munster championship. That move wasn't a success. In 12 matches over that period, the county won just one – a 1961 defeat of Clare. Former manager Jarlath Cloonan once made the point that it was hard for a county to parachute in to the intensity of the Munster championship when it didn't mean as much to them.

More relevantly the county team wasn’t particularly good at the time and it took that decade’s famous Coiste Iomána scheme to re-seed the game’s growth in Galway.

Hayes believes there is a similar emotional deficit in the current arrangement, suggesting that the celebrations after winning Leinster in 2012 were largely because of the historic nature of the win.

“It’s not a lack of respect; it’s a lack of engagement. Compare this Sunday with the following Sunday when the Galway footballers play Roscommon in the Connacht football final.

“I know people wouldn’t see me as a big football man but I’d be more excited about winning that than winning the Leinster hurling.

Beat Kilkenny

“I’d love to beat Kilkenny and be just one game away from an All-Ireland final but it wouldn’t be the same as winning the Connacht football. If we are being presented with the cup on Sunday, it’s almost like you’re robbing the blooming thing!

“There’d be far more excitement for us in winning an All-Ireland semi-final.”

Whatever the format, it can’t of itself bridge the 28-year gap to when Hayes captained Galway to what remains their most recent All-Ireland. It can, however, give the season more definition and a reasonable spread of fixtures.

“The rest of it,” says Hayes, “we have to do ourselves.”