Galway underestimated Heneghan’s impact
Darragh Heneghan scores Roscommon's third goal during Sunday's two-point victory against Galway at King and Moffatt Dr. Hyde Park. Picture: INPHO/James Crombie
Can we bottle this feeling?
I’ve an image in my mind. A few minutes after Sean Hurson’s final whistle on Sunday. I’m up in the press box at the back of the stand looking out across a sea of primrose and blue. There’s a giant Swedish flag amongst all the Rossie flags.
The sky, the stadium, everything. Everything is perfect.
That’s an image that will stay with me until I die. The feeling was perhaps best summed up by the prominent local media man who declared if he dies tomorrow, he’ll die happy! I think we all get how he feels.
How does one park that emotion and analyse the game? I’m not sure. Elements of it defy any sound analysis.
I think of that period in the last ten minutes, before and after Damien Comer’s brilliant goal. The momentum was only going one way. We had battled hard, but Galway’s stranglehold in the middle third had wrenched control for them. It felt like we were sliding helplessly down an icy mountain-face.
Then, miraculously, we got a grip.
Paul Carey was standing on the terrace side at the edge of the arc. The same Paul Carey that was swinging those kinds of kicks over the bar for fun for Pádraig Pearses in last year’s club championship. He nailed it.
Galway’s momentum was stopped in that moment.
Next, we worked the ball to Daire Cregg on the same side of the field. He was under pressure but arced over a superb double. The momentum was solely ours now. It was Galway who were on the mountain face, ready to be pushed off.
We won a free and there was dissent, and it was brought up to the edge of the arc on the stand side. Diarmuid stroked it over as though he was tapping over a 13-metre free from in front of the posts. He added a one pointer for good measure and we were all in dreamland.
At this stage, Sunday night, with every WhatsApp group hopping with images and clips of the celebrations in our county town and everywhere else, I’m still struggling to make sense of those few minutes.
In time, I’ll watch it back and get a better sense of the whys and why nots.
We came up with a few big wins on kickouts in that period. One super pick-up by Cian McKeon of a breaking ball stands out. Did that lead to Diarmuid’s two-pointer? I think so. A big moment, of which there were many in that final hurrah.
I find that easier to get a sense of the rest of the game. It was an outstanding battle between two excellent teams.
There were some fascinating duels all over the pitch. Galway will have been happy with how they did marking Enda Smith. Yet, at the same time Enda, made a savage contribution for us. I’d have thought they would deploy Seán Kelly on him but instead they brought in Kieran Molloy and he did well, even kicking an excellent two-pointer himself.
Dylan McHugh seemed to be tasked with marshalling Darragh Heneghan. McHugh is a superb player but that was a very sobering experience for him. In spite of Heneghan’s great showing against Mayo, I think Galway underestimated him.
With a guy with that level of pace, you can’t squeeze in too tight on him because he’ll just shimmy to one side and he’ll be gone. That happened over and over again, and it wasn’t until near the end of the game that they finally seemed to twig it that this guy was killing them. Cillian McDaid was the first one to put in a decent effort in terms of tackling him, although I think he injured himself in the process.
Pádraic Joyce and co will feel like they’re picking through the pieces of rubble left due to the destruction caused by Darragh Heneghan. It’ll go down as one of the great individual performances in a Roscommon jersey.
Two years ago, I sat in the press box looking down at Roscommon Gaels, under Mark Dowd, being pushed to the pin of the collar by Iain Daly’s Michael Glavey’s in a brilliant county senior championship semi-final. There was a guy who I’d not heard of before making serious inroads through the Gaels defence at will with incredible, lung-busting, high-speed runs.
Since then, I’ve been wondering when Darragh Heneghan would make the step up to county level. As first-season impacts go, it’s hard to remember better.
While Heneghan was the most clearcut of Man of the Match winners, I reckon the next best player in my book flew more under the radar. I thought Conor Carroll was exceptional.
Overall, it felt like Galway had the upper hand when kickouts went long. That was so pronounced that they could have fully dominated us, had we not been able to retain so much of our own kickouts through Carroll’s short punts.
It was the same when we were under the cosh early on against Mayo. We survived on a drip of Carroll’s accurate kicks, very often to our corner-backs.
When Joyce has finished coming to terms with Heneghan’s impact, he’ll then struggle to figure out why Galway let Roscommon get their kickouts away, particularly to the left corner back position, so often.
Carroll’s not alone in being in line for praise in this. His defenders were excellent in their synchronised movement to create the space into which he fired the ball again and again.
Within seconds of Comer’s goal, which looked to have flattened us, Carroll had the ball out to the corner-backs again and off we went. It was a brilliant performance by him.
Looking back, I didn’t fall into the trap last week of predicting an outcome to the game. I did say, however, that I thought it would be a cracker. I felt that both teams were well-positioned to put in a strong performance and that’s how it worked out.
Predicting winners in these tight games is a fool’s errand, but if you’d have told me that both Shane Walsh and Damien Comer were going to be in top form, the balance would have strongly swung in favour of a Galway win.
Walsh was majestic at times while Comer was the textbook definition of a big impact from the bench in the second half. If they can get those two and Rob Finnerty starting together inside, along with Mattie Tierney a little further out the field, then I expect their graph to keep trending upwards. Who knows, we could meet them again down the line.
Yet, in spite of a lot going right for Galway, we found a way to win. And what a win it was.
A buddy has just messaged advising me to let ChatGPT finish the article. Coffey’s is hopping, he said. Every pub in the county is hopping, I’d say.
ChatGPT might be good, but it doesn’t know how it feels to be a Rossie. I’ll head down shortly to join them for an hour, but the best craic will be tomorrow when I get to go to work in a school full of fanatical Roscommon kids and relive the magic of today with them all over again.
Once again, can we bottle this moment?
