People are quick to latch onto the narrative that Galway football is on the road back to the top table because they reckon it's time they were.

But, if there is any progress being made, it is crawlingly slow.

Dangerously satisfied after their second All-Ireland in four years in 2001, Galway football drifted, at first almost imperceptibly, into the wilderness in the mid-noughties. After a flickering renaissance around 2008, their descent into irrelevance gathered speed and probably peaked with their loss to Antrim in the 2012 championship - Padraig Joyce's last championship game.

The 'Galway are back' storyline did receive a shot in the arm last year after Galway beat two supposedly cussed Ulster sides in the qualifiers.

But both Armagh and Derry have their own problems and neither victory was achieved with any great swagger. Though, at the time, the absence of swagger was taken as a positive. The matches were won in a most un-Galway like fashion. Galway were suddenly capable of winning arm wrestles! The Derry game, in particular, was exactly the type of game Galway would have lost by one point earlier in the decade.


In that sense, it seems progress is being made. And yet, their League campaign, after a bright start, petered out badly and they failed to register a home win.

Long time observer Jim Carney - former RTE commentator, journalist, football historian and uncle of Ciaran Murphy - doesn't subscribe to the narrative that Galway's time is coming and Mayo will be toppled soon.

In a Tuam Herald article entitled 'Aidan O'Shea will turn the Connacht championship into a one horse race', Carney lamented the low expectations.

Maybe nobody cares anymore that a county with a proud tradition of competing at the highest level won only two of their seven games. Nowadays, drawing with Fermanagh, Armagh and Meath appears to be acceptable. Losing to Cavan in the final round? Has nobody the courage to say it like it is? There are no positives when you lose.

Jim is thoroughly fed up. He even suggested that this year's Connacht semi-final could see a repeat of the massacre of 2013.