{"id":616329,"date":"2026-09-06T14:30:10","date_gmt":"2026-09-06T14:30:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/616329\/"},"modified":"2026-09-06T14:30:10","modified_gmt":"2026-09-06T14:30:10","slug":"joyce-exit-brings-down-curtain-on-colourful-era","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/616329\/","title":{"rendered":"Joyce exit brings down curtain on colourful era"},"content":{"rendered":"

Padraic Joyce’s departure brings to an end a colourful and tumultuous era in Galway football.<\/p>\n

A vibrant presence in the managerial paddock has exited stage left. Those pristine white runners will no longer traipse the inter-county sideline. The airpods have gone back in the case.<\/p>\n

The media will miss his occasionally unpredictable bluntness and his penchant for issuing cutting verdicts on his star players’ performances.<\/p>\n

When it came, his resignation was out of the blue.<\/p>\n

Rumours had swirled around social media in the week leading up to the All-Ireland final that Joyce was about to quit. On this desk, inquiries were made about whether we needed to have a ‘Joyce departs…’ article prepared and ready to go. Public denials were issued.<\/p>\n

There were, it has to be said, plenty of Galway supporters who wanted him gone in the wake of their sickening quarter-final defeat to Dublin. From our own sampling of the mood at the time, it’s doubtful whether he would have survived a plebiscite within the county that week.<\/p>\n

But it appeared for all the world he was set on digging in and remaining at the helm. He was going to manage Galway to Sam or die trying.<\/p>\n

But now he’s gone. The word is that a lack of energy had made his mind up for him.<\/p>\n

How will his reign be remembered overall? A period of progression and advancement or one marred by missed opportunities?<\/p>\n

\"28
\nJoyce reacts during the 2026 quarter-final defeat to Dublin<\/p>\n

Like his old strength and conditioning coach, Eddie O’Sullivan, Joyce brought his team to another level and made them full blown contenders but without ever claiming the holy grail.<\/p>\n

Galway had supplanted Mayo in the Connacht hierarchy during Joyce’s period in charge, a state of affairs that was still thought to pertain until a couple of months ago.<\/p>\n

But now Galway have suffered a second successive demoralising exit and Mayo have come from way back in the pack to win the lot, ending decades of anguish and going viral around the world.<\/p>\n

Mayo’s victory was reminiscent of something the late John O’Mahony once said regarding his own attitude during Galway’s All-Ireland winning campaign in 1998 – “we’ll have this All-Ireland won before anyone realises it”.<\/p>\n

In Mayo’s case, not alone did they win it before anyone realised it, they seemed to win it before they themselves had much time to think about it, which was probably the way to do it.<\/p>\n

When Joyce succeeded Kevin Walsh as manager at the end of 2019, he was assumed to represent a swing back towards the purist tendency in Galway football.<\/p>\n

From the mid-2000s, Galway had alternated between half-embracing the defensive footballing revolution sweeping the land and then reverting to their traditional approach.<\/p>\n

Walsh had laboured hard to bring Galway up-to-speed on the defensive side of the game, guiding them to a couple of Connacht titles in 2016 and 2018.<\/p>\n

Joyce, Man of the Match in Galway’s last All-Ireland victory in 2001 and one of the best forwards of the modern times, was painted as someone who was going to return them to their freewheeling ways.<\/p>\n

\"26
\nPadraic Joyce alongside Derek Savage when the 2001 Galway jubilee team were introduced<\/p>\n

They played champagne football in the early rounds of the 2020 league before the whole sporting world ground to a halt. Any momentum they had built ebbed away during the interregnum.<\/p>\n

When Galway lost the 2021 Connacht final to Mayo in Croke Park, it meant that they had won just two of the previous 13 Connacht championships.<\/p>\n

In that context, presiding over four provincial titles in a row was a significant achievement for Joyce. When they sealed the four-in-a-row in Connacht in 2025, it was the first time they had managed the feat since 1966. The 60s team, however, added three All-Ireland titles into the bargain.<\/p>\n

Joyce showed impressive adaptability after his first two seasons in Galway. He later alluded to a clear-the-air meeting in the wake of the 2021 campaign, after which he altered how he was interacting with players.<\/p>\n

By then, he’d been caricatured as someone whose stature and temperament was intimidating to his players. Someone who watched his forwards missing easy chances and couldn’t fathom how they were doing so. Another test case in how great players don’t often make great managers.<\/p>\n

Over the next three seasons, having tweaked his managerial style and augmenting his management team with the much-travelled Cian O’Neill, he led Galway to their first All-Ireland decider since his own greatest day in 2001 and then repeated the feat two years later.<\/p>\n

During the second run to the All-Ireland final, in 2024, they essentially finished off the great Dublin team of the 2010s, beating them by a point in a memorable quarter-final, in what would be the last inter-county appearance of James McCarthy, Brian Fenton and Jack McCaffrey.<\/p>\n

That’s the campaign that Galway will harbour most regrets about. In the 2022 final, they were neck and neck with Kerry throughout only to suffer a late fade-out and lose by four. But the reaction to that loss was relatively tolerant and forgiving, given that they were new to that stage and Kerry were the opposition.<\/p>\n

The 2024 final was the one they were supposed to win. So many things went wrong. Rob Finnerty, who finished the year with an All-Star, limped off injured after 10 minutes. Shane Walsh endured a nightmarish day on frees amid questions about his fitness.<\/p>\n

\"29
\nThe win over Dublin in 2024 was one of the high points of Joyce’s reign<\/p>\n

In an infamously dull and cagey final, they were pipped by a point. Joyce didn’t sugarcoat the disappointment (he didn’t sugarcoat much). “We’ll regret it until our last breath,” he sighed later that year.<\/p>\n

Galway seemed a good fit for the new rules but it’s been a frustrating couple of years in which they’ve continually surrendered winning positions. Ironically, they may have come close to perfecting the old methodical, slow-moving game right at the moment when the rules were changed.<\/p>\n

Repeated failings keep cropping up. In the damning quarter-final loss to Dublin – which turned out to be Joyce’s last stand – their shooting efficiency was superior to their opponents and quite exceptional in the first half but they were unable to get their hands on enough possession.<\/p>\n

Most of their rivals at the top end of the game appeared to evolve some ploys for stacking the deck in their favour on their own kickouts, or at least offered some variety to keep the opposition guessing.<\/p>\n

With Galway, on the other hand, their every kick-out seemed to be a Hail Mary. C\u00e9in D’Arcy, Matthew Tierney and John Maher were thought to have the size and athletic profile to give Galway the edge in that department but the westerners were destroyed on breaking ball in the middle third.<\/p>\n

While their neighbours to the north party on stage at Electric Picnic with some of Galway’s most famous ambassadors, the Tribesmen are in a strange spot. There’s abundant talent around the squad though some of their most gifted players are approaching their mid-30s with heavy mileage on the clock.<\/p>\n

Joyce was adamant after the Dublin loss that they were “close”. But he won’t be around next year to bring them closer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Padraic Joyce’s departure brings to an end a colourful and tumultuous era in Galway football. A vibrant presence…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":616330,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[61,60,112],"class_list":["post-616329","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/616329","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=616329"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/616329\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/616330"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=616329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=616329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=616329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}