Price of Ros Loss. Published in The Sligo Weekender, July 2013

JJ Devaney says that Kevin Walsh's tenure began to fade following the Connacht Final loss to Roscommon in 2010

Kevin Walsh’s 5 year reign as Sligo manager ended on Saturday evening just outside Dungiven, Co. Derry. There were no tactical moves left for Kevin Walsh except to deny the media assembled in the corridors of Derry’s magnificent centre of excellence first word of his departure. When the ‘Sunday Game’ Twitter account released that Walsh had stepped down few were very surprised. Kevin Walsh told the media he would ‘see what happens’ regarding his future and then resigned minutes later. It was a final dummy, one last drop of the shoulder to sidestep a question he has somehow avoided for the last three years.

 Losing to London in Ruislip should not be the defining memory of the Walsh era. That late, late goal chance for Pat Hughes that hit the crossbar was not the turning point. The London defeat was the logical end of the downward spiral that had begun at the Connacht Championship on the 18^th of July, 2010. From the moment Neil Ewing fouled Roscommon’s Johnathan Duggan under the stand in McHale Park to set up Donie Shine for the Connacht title winning free this Sligo team under Kevin Walsh has been in free-fall. Rising to Division 2 with back to back league promotions in 09 and 10 and a heartening fight against Kerry in the 2009 All-Ireland qualifiers were the stimulus for historic defeats of Galway and Mayo in the Connacht championship in 2010. Since then it has been a litany of poor results and heavy defeats for Sligo under Kevin Walsh. Losing that Connacht championship final was traumatic and represents the single biggest missed opportunity for silverware in Sligo football history. To beat Mayo and Galway in one Connacht championship campaign and then lose to Roscommon in the final was a blow from which Walsh and his dressing room never recovered.

 It took a defeat to London to bring into sharp focus the decline of the Sligo team but really the results of the last three years speak for themselves and make one wonder how the Sligo County board allowed Kevin Walsh to make it to Ruislip as manager. The axe could have fallen after the decimation of his team against Down in the qualifiers in 2010 or after only scoring 4 points against Kildare in last years qualifiers or defeat to Wicklow in Aughrim in 2011 after being eliminated from the Connacht championship by a Leitrim team that hadn’t won a championship game in 3 years. Sligo also nearly returned to division 4 football after a wretched league campaign this year. 2012’s defeat of Galway in the Connacht semi-final was but a brief respite.

London may have been the lowest point but that was a defeat three years in the making. Kevin Walsh’s last 3 years as manager have been an exercise in postponing what should have been inevitable as his team sleep-walked through a mire of terrible performances. Defeat to London and surrender to Derry were only the final chapter in what has been Kevin Walsh’s long goodbye.