By Cian O'Connell

It was a Galway success loaded with character which pleased manager Kevin Walsh.

Roscommon posed plenty of tough questions throughout an interesting encounter at Dr Hyde Park, but Galway found the answers in the second period.

Galway outscored Roscommon by 0-11 to 1-1 after the restart as the locals failed to registered a score from play.

What made Galway able to dig out a victory? "Experience," Walsh says. "Work. One or two youths coming in without fear. The older fellas learning a lot more than what they'd learned in the past. Workrate. You name it – there's loads of things there. 

"Sometimes it won't work for you; sometimes it will. But you have to give yourself a chance, and in fairness they gave themselves a chance."

Under duress initially, Galway, came thundering back and the resolve shown encouraged Walsh. "Obviously at half-time, we certainly wouldn’t have been happy," Walsh reflected.

"It wasn’t that we couldn’t get our hands on the ball – there was an awful lot of ball given away, a lot of silly passes, kick-passes, passes in front of the forward, but kicked too high, five-yard handpasses given away.

"That’s a lot of turnovers and it put us on the back foot for a lot of that first half. And when you have the breeze at your back, you can’t afford to do that."

Even when Roscommon edged in front late on courtesy of a Conor Devaney penalty, Galway remained cool. "We got in at half-time and had a stern enough chat and you can’t say anything, but good things about the lads in the second half," Walsh stated. "We got hit by a point directly after half-time to go down four and then a penatly out fo the blue.

"We were finding it hard ourselves to get a few frees down at the edge of the square and so the penatly was another sucker punch. But maybe in the long run, it’s not such a bad thing.

"It asked lads to stand up and that’s what they did so fair play to them."