Ten years ago, in Ger Loughnane’s first winter as Galway manager, the players were taken to sand gallops near Tubber for pre-season training. The daytime function of the facility was the conditioning of racehorses; for Loughnane’s purpose it was a place for the Galway players to discover their inner Hercules. Many of the laps were against the clock with the management spread around the circuit, whip-lashing with their tongues. To test the players’ minds there were idiosyncratic twists too: one was running with their hands in the air, like prisoners of war. Sounds simple? Try it.
The venue had been vetted for hardship: the showers were five spouts on a stable wall; the ice-baths were outdoors. One player said years later that there were nights when he contemplated “faking a crash” rather than completing the journey to Tubber. “It was rough and it was cold,” says Fergal Moore now. “The colder and the rougher it was the more Loughnane liked it.”
In his newspaper column after Galway lost the 2005 All-Ireland final Loughnane wrote that Galway lacked “leaders and big men of substance.” Furthermore, he said, “many of their players have suspect temperaments.” It wasn’t an original line of criticism. For years before and for years afterwards variations on those themes were touted as indisputable insight whenever Galway fell down in the championship.
What developed over time was the conviction that Galway’s players could be given what they lacked. That it could inserted by elective surgery; without an anaesthetic. For a while Clare from the 1990s was the preferred template. Seven years before Loughnane arrived his drill sergeant from that era, Mike McNamara, appeared on Noel Lane’s management team. He was hired as a steelmaker. “The perception,” McNamara said, “was that if you hound Galway they’ll eventually fold.”
McNamara only entertained one way of calcifying Galway’s softness: by brute force. Their discipline was flaky so that was addressed straight away. At the first training session on a miserable November evening some lads wandered in five minutes late, others ten. As each one joined the session the whole group was forced to repeat the running that the latecomers had missed; at the end of the session extra running was added for those who had been loose with the clock.
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When McNamara set about x-raying the Galway players, looking for heart and other vital organs, punishing 20-minute runs were part of the routine. In the beginning some players would crack before the 20 minutes had elapsed and, as they did, the run was aborted and everybody was forced to do it again. McNamara’s thinking was simple: if they couldn’t depend on each who could they depend on?
“It was crazy stuff,” says Fergal Healy. “I remember runs on a back pitch in Loughrea where there was no grass, just muck. Every session was over two hours. We ran in groups in a big circle and you had to catch the group in front of you which was virtually impossible. It was horrific stuff, brutal. It was a shock to the system for us to do that kind of intense physical work for such a long duration.”
The back-alley psychology that underpinned this kind of training was that the minds of the Galway players could be reached through physical suffering: if they could endure McNamara’s training they were fit for anything. Did it work? In McNamara’s first year with Noel Lane they beat Kilkenny in the 2001 All-Ireland semi-final by force and other means and lost the final to Tipperary by just a goal; a year later they lost a quarter-final to Clare and Lane was run out of the job.
Loughnane’s approach carried over from the pre-season boot camp to the training pitch where he commanded some of the drills with manic energy. Healy remembers one in particular: a player would be stationed on each 20 metre line with one player in the middle, receiving a ball from each end in rapid fire. “He used to march across the middle, shouting at us and abusing us — and roaring encouragement too, I suppose. I’ll never forget that drill, it was up there with Mike Mac’s running. You could spend five minutes in the middle and you’d be on your knees. You could hit 50 or 100 balls in that time. It was savage.”
While the hurling drills were in full flight Loughnane would issue a bellowing commentary: “Where’s your bottle when your legs are gone. That’s when games are won, when your legs are gone. Keep your heads.”
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“Two more balls to win the All-Ireland,” he said one night as he reached a frenzied crescendo. It was all part of Loughnane’s homespun psychology. He was massaging their minds as every other part of their body was being flogged.
“The first year he came in he was refreshing,” says Moore. “We did the crazy training but it was more his approach to the opposition. How little he respected them, his attitude towards them. He had no respect for the Kilkennys or the Corks. He had no respect for anyone. That was different for us. Only the first year mind, the wheels came off in the second year.”
His first year was described as “disastrous” by the chairman of the Galway hurling board at the time; his second and final year finished with a qualifier defeat against a Cork team who played with 14 men for 37 minutes. It was precisely the kind of unfathomable, weak-minded performance for which Galway players have been excoriated by Loughnane in his newspaper columns over the years and it had happened on his watch.
What did they need that nobody could give them? The quality of their hurling was basically unimpeachable. The acquisition of fitness and power wasn’t a mystery: anybody could get it; they had it. The conclusion that hardened year on year was that Galway didn’t have the mind to win.
In pursuit of a solution Galway didn’t rule out sports psychology over the years, even when it was the sports science that dare not speak its name in the GAA. Niamh Flynn worked with them in Lane’s time; Enda McNulty and Gerry Hussey came in with John McIntyre; John McGuire is now a hugely successful entrepreneur in the world of golf but he was a performance coach at one time and Galway engaged him too. Were they absolutely committed to this route?
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“They weren’t really with us,” says Alan Kerins, who played under five different Galway managers. “They’d come in for the odd motivational talk but realistically sports psychology needs to be full-time with input into all sessions. That’s happening now but it didn’t happen with anyone else.”
“Under Anthony [Cunningham] we didn’t have one in the first year [2012 when they reached the All-Ireland final],” says Moore. “After a while then there was an odd one coming and going. We met two lads, I can’t remember their names, before we played Waterford in the league in 2015 – the day they gave us the hockeying.” The first vote of no-confidence in Cunningham by the players followed days later.
McIntyre did a three-year stint as manager and in a couple of those years they shaped like contenders. Like every other Galway manager of the last couple of decades, though, he inherited a squad burdened by defeat. “When you come in,” says McIntyre, “you’re trying to scatter the past in all directions.”
Two of McIntyre’s years ended in defeat to Waterford. In 2011 they had beaten Clare by 17 points and Cork by 12 before they arrived in Thurles as favourites for an All-Ireland quarter-final and lost by 10 points to a Waterford team who had been beaten in the Munster final. “There was no logical reason for the way Galway played that day,” he says. “Maybe the bit of expectancy got to them.”
What was missing? That’s been the question for nearly 30 years.
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“This defeat showed that Galway are made of absolutely nothing,” wrote Loughnane after the Leinster final last year. “They have no guts whatsoever.”
Thirteen months later Galway are league and Leinster champions, unbeaten since February and favourites for the All-Ireland. Have they found something?
They never stopped looking.