“Thirty-five years ago, a group of men won the 1889 hurling championship of Ireland. They were associated with the drapery trade of Dublin and had adopted a name of historic significance. At Croke Park yesterday a Kickhams selection again won an Irish hurling championship from last year’s victors. It was a great achievement made possible by organisation and unselfish selection.” – The Irish Times, December 15th, 1924
The above introduction to the match report from Croke Park captures the only senior All-Ireland hurling final to date between Dublin and Galway. Over a century later and Galway have yet to defeat their opponents in a fixture played in the capital.
For most of the intervening decades that has been an unexceptional statistic, as the counties hardly ever met. Only one further championship match took place for the rest of the 20th century, an All-Ireland semi-final in Roscrea, which Dublin won.
This century however has seen the introduction in 2009 of Galway to the Leinster championship, now played on a round-robin basis. The counties have over those 16 seasons played five times in either Parnell Park or Croke Park and Dublin still remain unbeaten – despite their opponents having operated at a different level, contesting four All-Ireland finals and winning one.
Parnell Park this weekend is the stage for the latest of these matches, as Galway attempt to address this fruitless sequence. It will be the 15th championship meeting and Dublin lead 8-4 with two draws.
There have also been close connections between the counties. This weekend, for instance, Micheál Donoghue is taking the visitors to a ground where he managed Dublin for the past two years – the same venue where his first term as Galway manager ended in defeat six years ago.
It is all the more complicated in that Donoghue left Dublin after the second year of a three-year appointment during which he led the team to a big win in Pearse Stadium and indirectly created the vacancy in his home county that he ended up filling.
Niall Corcoran is another with a dual connection, albeit in his case longer lasting. A former under-21 hurler and senior panellist in his home county, he came to Dublin in the mid-2000s to work as a development officer and stayed. He is now head of coach and player development at Kilmacud Crokes GAA club.
He also played for the most successful Dublin team of the past 60 years and is well placed to compare the counties.
“Looking at my own career with Galway, we’d have never played Dublin. I probably wouldn’t have viewed them as a traditional hurling stronghold. Certainly, they wouldn’t have been viewed that way back in Galway at the time.”
Despite these low expectations, Corcoran threw in his lot with his new home, debuting against Wexford in 2008.
“I suppose when I came in, I was surprised that the standard of hurling was quite high,” he recalls, “certainly higher than I expected to be.
“I would hold my hands up in the first year and say, I probably struggled a small bit with the standard and probably got in only because of a couple of injuries. But then obviously, I began to find my feet. So yeah, it was definitely different.”
The appointment of former Clare manager and All-Ireland winning captain, Anthony Daly, would prove transformative.
Under Daly, Dublin became contenders, winning a national league in 2011 with a crushing defeat of Kilkenny in the final and two years later a first Leinster title in 50 years, beating Galway, the reigning provincial champions.
For Corcoran, the first Leinster championship encounter with Galway in 2011 was most significant and not just on a personal level.
“I suppose for me it was different. It was probably at times maybe a bit personal but to be fair to Dalo, he managed me well on those occasions.”
Played a few weeks after the league final it copper-fastened the team as a serious presence.
“The Dublin players who had been there before me had never played Galway on a regular basis. They’d been used to playing Kilkenny, Wexford. So, Galway was a different type of team, different type of game.
“That national hurling league gave us huge confidence in 2011 and then beating Galway in that Leinster Championship semi-final – we had, I suppose, beaten the likes of Wexford and even Clare when they were under transition. But Galway would have been viewed as a strong contender for All-Irelands. So, to beat them in Tullamore was a huge stepping stone, certainly for a team I was on.”
Stephen Hiney was a member of those teams and a former Dublin captain. He points out that there was no baggage when it came to Galway – respect, certainly for their status as regular All-Ireland contenders but not the learned apprehension of facing Kilkenny. There was even a slight grievance.
“The mentality in the background was, we didn’t have that negative relationship with Galway plus they were coming into our Leinster championship and making it a very difficult task, even more difficult, so there could have been an element of resentment. Whatever it was, since then they’ve always found it very difficult to get a result against Dublin.”
Having won that first match in 2011, Hiney says that his team were defining the terms of engagement from the start.
“We created our own history and legacy and started it off with quite a strong sequence of results and obviously with the Leinster title in 2013. Funnily enough, we as a club in Ballyboden were very strong at the time and we played a number of challenges against that awesome Portumna team [four-time All-Ireland winners], with the likes of the Cannings. They were competitive encounters, so we weren’t intimidated by Galway’s best players.”
In 2013, Dublin’s momentum had been built during two replays in Leinster, against Wexford and then Kilkenny, who they beat in championship for the first time in 71 years. The match with Galway in the provincial final was their fifth in five weeks.
There’s no difference between the dynamic of a team in Galway and the dynamic of a team in Dublin. There are two things in life. There are people that believe they can do it and there’s people that believe they can’t do it.
— Mattie Kenny
“I think we were in a super self-confident place at the time with Dalo leading everything,” says Hiney. “We felt we belonged where we were and didn’t feel out of place going into that Leinster final.
“Maybe the replay against Kilkenny reaffirmed that with us, so the first day we played really well and got a draw and people probably thought – well, based on everything in history – okay, the next day we’re going to see the real Kilkenny and they’ll have missed their chance. That wasn’t the way it played out.
“We would have been relatively confident against Galway. For whatever reason, we’ve always got a good result against them. Certainly, there was no way we could have been cocky because we hadn’t won anything in whatever number of championships.”
Club fortunes have also been influential in Dublin’s evolution. This year Na Fianna won the All-Ireland, making their coach Niall Ó Ceallacháin an obvious choice to fill the county vacancy left by Donoghue. Along the way, Na Fianna defeated Galway champions Loughrea.
In 2017, Cuala became Dublin’s first club champions, winning back-to-back in 2018 for good measure, beating Galway champions Liam Mellows in that year’s semi-final.
Another connection with Galway is Mattie Kenny, who managed Cuala to those All-Irelands and then took the over reins of Dublin from Pat Gilroy. Kenny had been part of Anthony Cunningham’s management team when Galway won Leinster and a year later, when Dublin beat them.
Under Kenny, Dublin beat Galway twice, once in 2019 in Parnell Park to eliminate their opponents from the All-Ireland and again in 2021, this time in Croke Park.
He disagrees with the concept of teams carrying baggage.
“There’s no difference between the dynamic of a team in Galway and the dynamic of a team in Dublin. There are two things in life. There are people that believe they can do it and there’s people that believe they can’t do it.
“Both are right. If you believe you can’t do it, you won’t do it. If you believe you can do it, you have a good chance of doing it.”
Hiney is optimistic that Dublin can do it as the latest instalment beckons at Parnell Park tomorrow/on Sunday.
“I think that the way that pitch plays and the atmosphere that can be in the ground because the crowd’s so close to the pitch sets it up. I don’t want to say it gives Dublin an advantage but it surely isn’t a disadvantage, I can assure you of that. With Dublin’s form where it is, we’ll see this as a real opportunity to take Galway on.”
Heirs to a new tradition.
