Canning eager for elusive All-Ireland

Asked if he thought he’d still be chasing the Holy Grail heading into his tenth senior year with Galway, Canning shook his head.

“No, I didn’t,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s just naivety or something like that but when you are younger you think you can do it and you have a chance. You still think you have a chance every year to win an All-Ireland.

“We’ve had a couple of shots at it and it hasn’t worked out but you are always thinking you are good enough. You wouldn’t be doing it if you didn’t think deep down that you were good enough. Personally, yeah, I thought I might have one.”

The four-time All-Ireland club title winner admitted there was little solace in Tipperary’s senior success last year, just weeks after Galway came up a point short of them in the semi-finals.

“No, no, you’d be kind of half sickened, to be straight up,” he said. “There’s no point in saying anything else. You become very selfish in those kind of situations and you’re going ‘f*** it, we could have been there, that could be us.’

“Still, if we’d gotten to the final, you don’t know what would have been the result. Kilkenny could have beaten us.

“It’s not feeling sorry for yourself in any way, it’s just frustration, I suppose. You’d like to be a part of winning. You see other guys winning so many – Kilkenny winning ten, 12, in the last number of years and you’re kind of going, ‘Jesus, if I only got one I’d be happy enough’.”

Canning is currently recovering from the horrific tendon injury he sustained during last August’s All-Ireland semi-final defeat to Tipperary. “The muscle is fine,” he said. “The tendon attaches the muscle to the bone in your arse basically! It required surgery to reattach that. If it comes off the bone, it usually brings a bit of the bone with it.

“Paul O’Connell, for instance, had a similar injury. So you’d see a lot of rugby guys now retiring from it.

“I’m doing okay though. It’s five months next Tuesday since the surgery. They say it’s a seven or eight month thing. I’m a little bit ahead of schedule but I’d say it will probably be March by the time I’m fully back.”

Canning and Galway have been competing in the Leinster championship since 2009 though could be on the verge of a move to Munster. A motion passed at the Galway convention and which will be voted on at annual Congress next month proposes that all of their county teams compete together in the same province.

Galway’s minor and under-21 teams haven’t, so far, been accommodated by Leinster so the proposal, if passed, could see Galway move, en masse, to the Munster championship.

Another issue for Galway is that they have yet to play at home in the Leinster senior championship.

“I don’t see the benefit of going into Munster,” Canning said. “What are we going to do? Munster mightn’t let us play home games either.

“It’s the underage thing really, that the minors and under-21s get more matches. They’re missing out on development.”

Canning was joined by Pat Horgan, the Cork full-forward, at yesterday’s announcement that Bord Gais Energy have agreed a three-year deal to sponsor the All-Ireland Championship.

Horgan believes criticism of Cork’s 2016 campaign is unjustified

DONALL FARMER/INPHO

Horgan revealed his frustration with the criticism of Cork following a poor 2016 season, claiming it was a rare blip.

“If you take away last year, which is admittedly a hard thing to do because we weren’t impressive last year at all, before that we were seriously competitive,” Horgan said. “We got to a few Munster finals, an All-Ireland final, league finals, and they’re not easy to get to. If we listen to everyone else, we’ll only stay down.

“We just want to get consistency in our game. Last year, we played Dublin and were really good. In the next game, we were really bad. We’ve got to find that high level we can consistently reach.”