Galway blah

Only three days to go till the Salthill showdown and it’s mightily quiet out there, folks. Our lads appear to have their traps all shuttered up and there’s only a bit of blah from the opposite side to report.

There’s a piece in today’s Indo (the online version of which has undergone a snazzy remodelling overnight) where Peter Ford manages to say very little, apart from expressing optimism about the availability of his injured trio, Diarmuid Blake, Paul Geraghty and Alan Burke. He says the usual stuff about close matches between the teams and expresses the hope that Pearse Stadium might be worth a few points to them. Nothing of consequence, in other words.

Then there’s Joe Bergin in the Hogan Stand saying that Johnno’s in-depth knowledge of the Galway lads won’t be a factor. I’m not so sure: I had this odd dream last night that Johnno had hypnotised them all when he was in charge there and that, twenty minutes into the match, he blew this high-pitched whistle and immediately Bergin, Joyce, Savo and the other old-timers sat in a circle in the middle of the field and started playing imaginary banjos. We then proceeded to score 10-24 while the lads were in this trance and then . . . well, then I woke up and went looking for the tablets, didn’t I?

Anyway, as I've said things are spookily quiet, so much so that I’m reduced to pointing you in the direction of Michael Lyster’s piece on the RTE website about Connacht finals in the rare oul times. I know, I know, it doesn’t add that much to the sum total of human knowledge but there’s little else of interest out there today.

Even the usually active discussion boards appear to have fallen silent. The normally chatty Mayofans.com site is like the Marie Celeste at the minute, the thread on the Gaaboard.com site has only a very languid discussion about the forthcoming hostilities, so the field has been left clear to the Mayo message board on Hogan Stand, where the usual scatological repartee is taking place in earnest. At least some things never change.

We should have team news tonight, shortly after our Inda and Bertie have finished knocking lumps out of each other on the telly. Both sides (just to be clear, that’s Johnno and the Boxer I’m talking about, not Inda and Bertie) are likely to reveal their starting fifteen tonight. I have to confess that I have a bit of a logistical problem in terms of late-night posting tonight, folks, as I’m fleeing the capital with the wife and childers very early tomorrow morning and I could really do with the kip ahead of the 170-mile trek westwards. The journey will also delay my posting tomorrow (penalty points accrue, apparently, for blogging whilst driving) and, throwing the metaphorical hammer after the hatchet, when I get there (Clare, to be precise, as I’m planning a sneaky rearguard attack up the N18 on Sunday morning) I’ll then be on the wrong side of the digital divide, with only my GPRS connection providing a tenuous, sub-128k link to cyberspace.

That’s it. Oh almost forgot, I’ve just been to meet The Brother in town to pick up my tickets for Sunday, Stand ones no less. Oh, God be with the days when we used to roll up to the ground in the Ford Cortina with our greasy fivers in our pockets and . . . I’ll leave the rest of these reminiscences on days of yore to Michael Lyster as I have a few cables for my GPRS connectivity to sort out before the off.