“John O’Mahoney just said, this is the biggest day of your lives. It should be the best day of your lives. Just get out there and do your stuff. So we all just looked each other in the eyes and said ‘lads, we’re playing useless, simple as that.”
It’s the way John Divilly tells it. He was centre back on Galway’s 1998 All-Ireland winning team, he’s a selector now but forever more, and for anyone who’s seen the tape, he’ll be known as one of the main stars of the best GAA documentary ever made.
There could be another good one coming.
Any GAA person that hasn’t watched ‘A Year ‘Til Sunday,’ Pat Comer’s iconic documentary of Galway’s 1998 All-Ireland triumph, needs to spend an hour and 12 minutes on Youtube tonight. It’s that good.
There’s clips of the pre-season training, there’s dressing room footage and there’s team meetings but best of all, unlike like the soccer documentaries that Amazon are dropping at a rate of knots, is that there’s personality and there’s character in this one.
Take Galway’s captain Ray Silke, who starts the whole thing off in fitting fashion. “Winter training is a complete and utter pain in the ass,” he says in the first of a number of memorable interviews. GAA players everywhere know what he’s on about.
Then there’s Michael Donnellan – the brilliant Michael Donnellan – who sums it up, right at the finish, as well as anyone ever could, what it means to win an All-Ireland.
“The friendships of all the guys,” Donnellan says.
“You know, you play against them in club when you were younger, you didn’t know them and you’d have the auld battle with them and everything. But when you’re out training with them and running through the mud and then rain and hailstones and snow, the lot, something special has happened, to the 30 of us.”
And it’s all more relevant than ever now. That’s because, with Galway back in an All-Ireland final, back there for the first time since 2001, maybe it’s a coincidence or maybe it’s just fate – but Pat Comer is back in with the squad doing some video-work and some goalkeeping coaching. And when asked if the former sub-goalkeeper would have enough footage for another documentary, Padraic Joyce gave the answer we all wanted to hear and he gave it with a smile.
“I’d say he has.”
All they’ll need is to win the thing again now.
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