By John Harrington

Conor Cooney believes winning the All-Ireland Hurling Final this year has eased the pressure on his generation of Galway hurlers.

The St. Thomas’ club-man had previously lost two All-Ireland Finals before this year’s victory over Waterford, and thinks the hard lessons learned on those occasions stood to the team this year.

“We probably wouldn’t have been let back across the Shannon if we lost,” said Cooney in Singapore before the 2017 PwC All-Stars hurling match. 

“There was a lot of pressure there but in the build up we were just focusing on ourselves. It’s a bit of a cliche but we were.

“We were just focusing on ourselves and that stuff didn’t really get to us. We stuck to the process that we had, kept going, kept going the way we had been.

“We had that experience in the past of losing a couple of finals and I think that stood to us in a way because none of the hype really got to us at all.

“I suppose when we did win it was a great relief. There was an overwhelming feeling of relief.

“We’d been under a lot of pressure for a long time because the Galway public is mad into hurling and I suppose they expect so much every year and we finally achieved the goal we set out to achieve.

“It’s a new year coming and it’ll be a fresh start coming back to square one and every team will be going the whole hog to try and win it so you’ll have to have yourself 100% right and be right for Championship.”

The age-profile of this Galway team suggests they could win more All-Irelands in the coming years and even outstrip the famed team of the eighties that won back to back titles in '87 and '88.

Cooney is aware there’s a belief in the county that they will build on this year’s success, but he doesn’t think it’s a good idea to place too weighty a burden of expectation on their shoulders.

“I suppose lads talk about that but I suppose if you put yourself under that amount of pressure you’re maybe setting yourself up for a small bit of failure,” he said.

“We’ll enjoy this, it’s the first one we’ve won for a long time. We enjoy it for a while, we’re back training again, back training hard and trying to get the fitness levels up.

"We’re probably a small bit behind but we’ll get ourselves right and be ready to go again.”