Mid-season reflections can be unreliable. Twenty years ago, Tyrone and Galway grappled in a spell-binding league semi-final. It went to a replay before Galway won and there was no shortage of opinions that we had seen the teams likely to dominate 2004.
The first day’s report on these pages was effusive. “Sport doesn’t get much better than this,” wrote Keith Duggan. A week later and the replay was headlined, This one will live in the memory.
It all looks strange at this remove. Both teams went on to have poor seasons, not even winning their provincial titles. By the time they would meet in a qualifier in July, the air had gone out of the tyres. Galway were well beaten and All-Ireland winning manager John O’Mahony stepped down after seven momentous years. Tyrone would lose to Mayo in both provincial and All-Ireland titles.
John O’Mahony later recalled that the win had planted the idea in his head that the team might be able to do something that year
That wasn’t the impression back in April of that year.
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Mickey Harte’s Tyrone were champions and their opponents had won their second just three years previously. The play was fast and relentless. Both days went to extra time before Galway won by two.
O’Mahony later recalled that the win had planted the idea in his head that the team might be able to do something that year. He had stayed for another two years after 2002 to see if they could do it all again for a third time.
“Those two matches were very memorable,” remembers Galway captain on those days, Seán Óg de Paor. “By the end of the one in Omagh, there had been a bit of friction on the line. I looked at the highlights reel of the replay in Salthill and the size of the crowd hits you — the most packed for a league match I’d say it has ever been.”
That may be true although the attendance was supplemented by a hurling league match between Galway and Limerick.
The friction arose over allegations of fouling and diving. Galway’s Pádraic Joyce was sent off towards the end of the draw after a second yellow card that Harte would fume should have been shown earlier.
Tyrone’s Seán Cavanagh also remembers the semi-final well. “Galway were one of those teams we always seemed to struggle with. They had brilliant footballers, Pádraic Joyce, Michael Donnellan.
“Galway were never afraid to take us on and those days they came straight at us. I loved it, as I got the freedom to run but it also meant chasing back after Donnellan if we got turned over.”
For de Paor, Tyrone’s status prompted a reaction. “From our point of view, Tyrone were All-Ireland champions and we would have loved a crack at them. We were still a force, just three years after our own All-Ireland but it took matches like this to get us pumped up. We had to play Kerry a week later and we weren’t fully tuned in after the drama of the semi-finals and that’s no way to be facing Kerry.”
It took 18 years for Galway to re-emerge in an All-Ireland — with Joyce as manager.
“If you’d told us things would fizzle out like they did, we probably wouldn’t have believed you,” says de Paor whose season would end with a cruciate injury. “I suppose every team has its lifespan and every team says at the end of it, ‘we should have won more’.
“Funnily, I don’t see 2004 as the year that got away. In 2003 we lost after a replay to Donegal. We had everyone fit and had we won that match it would have been Armagh in the semi-final. We’d have got up for that!”
Galway appeared to tick all the right boxes in the years ahead. Having won little at under-age in the years leading up to 1998, the county won under-21 All-Irelands and minor and club but a senior title has yet to follow.
Cavanagh’s theory is that when a team loses the sense of possibility, it becomes harder to win the ultimate prize.
“When you stop winning, you lose that sense of the possible. Throughout our years after 2003 (in the 2000s) we always had a recent memory of winning the All-Ireland. When you believe something can happen it often does and we had no difficulty believing we could win one.”
The year 2004, however, goes down in their history for a lot more than an exciting league semi-final. The team’s new captain Cormac McAnallen had been appointed at the start of the year
So, it was different for Tyrone. Two more All-Irelands followed in 2005 and ‘08.
The year 2004, however, goes down in their history for a lot more than an exciting league semi-final. The team’s new captain Cormac McAnallen had been appointed at the start of the year.
“Cormac died a few weeks before that league match,” says Cavanagh. “I can still feel what it was like in those days and weeks. Even 20 years later, it’s still raw. He had just become captain at 24 and none of us batted an eyelid — he was the most dedicated, the most thoughtful.
“The most powerful meeting I was ever at was just before that season started and Cormac telling us all: one isn’t enough. Personally, before any big game I played for Tyrone, I went to Cormac’s grave, five minutes over the road from me in Eglish.”
The year caught up with them as well. Defeat by Donegal was the end of their Ulster title and Connacht champions Mayo halted their All-Ireland campaign in the quarter-finals.
“After the Mayo game, it was just a sense of relief. Maybe we could have made it to the final but Kerry would have had too much for us.”
That, like the league semi-final, is just another alternative history.
Tyrone v Galway, O’Neill’s Healy Park, Sunday, 1.45
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