JOHNNY GLYNN TORE Cork apart and scored one of the goals of the summer, and yet it was his post-match interview that hogged the headlines.
“It’s fucking bullshit,” was his refreshingly honest response when it was put to him that this Galway team are overly reliant on Joe Canning.
With those three words — a postscript to a man of the match performance which saw him score 1-2 — Glynn made certain that there was another forward to talk about.
“Johnny’s honest,” captain David Collins reflects with a smile.
“You get what you see, you know what I mean, and that’s what you want in a young fella. He wears his heart on his sleeve.
“I was delighted to see him play the way he did the last day. He put everything on the line, so hopefully he’ll do the same thing again the next day (in Sunday’s semi-final against Tipperary).”
Still only 22, Glynn’s summer exploded to life inside 48 seconds of the quarter-final. With shades of Kevin Broderick’s iconic solo run, he gathered a loose ball in midfield and raced towards the Cork goal, flicking the ball over Mark Ellis’s head before finishing.
That jaw-dropping skill, coupled with his post-match candour, propelled him into the limelight.
“I definitely wasn’t (surprised),” Collins says. “There’s a lot of guys are trained in media and lot of guys are well able to, I suppose, say what they need to say.
But asking a guy a question like that, coming straight off a match, after winning by 13 points, a Man of the Match performance, what answer do we really expect from Johnny Glynn?
“He wears his heart on his sleeve. A fantastic young guy.”
“Oh, he got plenty (of stick),” he continues. I think he got plenty of abuse in the dressing-room after the match, never mind on the bus. It was all over the place, I’d say, within a couple of minutes.
“As I said, it was a day where Johnny Glynn performed to his best in Thurles. His goal typified our attitude that day – it was go down and take it to Cork and put it up to them. That’s where we wanted to go and that’s what we did.”
On a normal day Collins would have been at the far end of the field, his view obscured as Glynn sliced through the Cork ramparts.
But the hamstring injury that ruled him out of the Leinster final still hadn’t fully cleared and, despite his determination to play, he had to be content with a late run-out from the bench.
“I was sitting in the stand, I was injured, but I was looking at it kind of going ‘This is not happening!’
“I was around when Kevin Broderick was finishing up hurling, and straight away I turned to one of the boys, ‘That was a serious Kevin Broderick incident.’
“But it was fantastic. How he got away with it, how he didn’t get milled going through, is another thing.
Now, I’ve trained with Johnny obviously – and taking Johnny Glynn down is like taking a crane down. He’s solid. So you’d want to be taking him from the ankles down to get rid of that fella.
And what of the question that Glynn was asked – are Galway too reliant on Canning?
“If you look at it really, when Joe Canning plays poorly and we still win by 13 points, we’ve got a great squad there,” Collins insists.
“You’ve got a great team. You’ve got a great five other guys in the forward line that put the shoulder to the wheel and came up with fantastic scores.”
Not quite as colourful an answer as Glynn’s, but no less defiant.
