The Galway rising defensive star, the Mayo attacking leader - Connacht final key duel
Paul Keane
WHENEVER JOHNNY MCGRATH does anything of note in a Galway jersey, a congratulatory message from the Galway City Harriers athletics club typically follows.
Like when he was both captain and man-of-the-match for the Galway minors in their 2019 All-Ireland semi-final defeat of Kerry at Croke Park. Or at the tail end of 2020 when, as the Mervue based athletics club noted proudly in a social media post, the defender played ‘a big part in Galway’s wonderful U20 All-Ireland final win against Dublin’ back at Croke Park.
Last year, before Galway played Donegal in the All-Ireland semi-final, his athletics club got in on the morning of the game with a best wishes note.
“Jonathan blazed a trail through our juvenile ranks, winning plenty as a sprinter and jumper, with several records still to his name,” read the note which was accompanied by the result of an U-11 long jump competition in which McGrath came first, leaping 3.71 metres.
That message added that McGrath’s father, John, ‘was one of our most valuable coaches over the past decade’ and that his siblings, Richard and Gillian, ‘also excelled here’.
All of which neatly explains where the reigning All-Star’s remarkable athleticism comes from. Now nine games into Galway’s 2025 season, McGrath is the only player who has started and finished every single game for the Tribesmen.His is truly a supercharged Rolls Royce engine.
To put that into context, captain Sean Kelly is the only other Galway player who has started all of their games this year but even he was taken off on a couple of occasions.
As for McGrath’s eagerness to get down and dirty at the coalface of inter-county defending, and the sheer ferocity with which the baby-faced Caherlistrane clubman attacks these duties, typically against the very best inter-county forwards, that comes from much deeper within.
Breaking the spirit of marquee forwards seems to be his vocation. And when the new rules were brought in last January freeing up more green grass for previously space-starved inside men to attack, McGrath relished the prospect of increased one-to-one combat when others in his position would have winced.
“I like it, it’s good,” he smiled, immediately after a gruelling head-to-head with Donegal’s in-form Conor O’Donnell in the league. “You get to go one-on-one with the best forwards in the country. You win some, you lose some.”
The thing is, McGrath hasn’t been losing very many of these battles, as his All-Star award attests, and if he can get the better of Mayo’s Ryan O’Donoghue again this Sunday, it could very well secure a fourth consecutive Connacht title for Galway.
When the sides met in the league, in early February, Galway won by 10 points and McGrath didn’t give O’Donoghue a sniff.
“Efforts to involve and free up Ryan O’Donoghue repeatedly failed due to Johnny McGrath’s policing,” wrote Martin Carney afterwards in his Connacht Telegraph column.
“Terrier-like, the Caherlistrane man snapped at the Belmullet man’s heels throughout and rendered him scoreless from play. In a forward line that is heavily dependent on O’Donoghue, once he is contained the team in general suffers.”
Carney wasn’t just spot on about McGrath’s limpet-like defending but about how much Mayo rely on O’Donoghue. He was their leading scorer in the National League with 0-42 and featured in all of their games, starting all but one. So far in Connacht he has returned 1-4 and 0-9 tallies against Sligo and Leitrim.
“I shudder to think what would happen if Ryan O’Donoghue got injured,” said Mark Ronaldson, another Mayo columnist in the Western People, who was looking to this weekend.
“He is such a leader and his battle against Johnny McGrath will go a long way towards deciding the outcome.”
Much of Mayo’s preparations this week will focus on how they can get O’Donoghue not just into scoring positions but into positions where he can get his shots away. In last year’s corresponding Connacht final fixture, McGrath held O’Donoghue to a single point from play.
Earlier in 2024, when they met in the league, Mayo won though McGrath, notably, edged out O’Donoghue again, executing some important steals, shadowing him throughout and again holding him scoreless.
Mind you, Mayo will have noted the trouble Roscommon’s Ben O’Carroll caused McGrath at times in Salthill. There is a suggestion that a high ball in could be McGrath’s kryptonite too, so Mayo may go after that in some form.
McGrath and O’Donoghue were first on the field of play together as county seniors in 2022. McGrath made his inter-county senior debut for Galway that season in a four-point FBD League semi-final win over Mayo, coming on in the 57th minute. O’Donoghue had come on earlier in that game.
They’ve both started, and finished, five games since then, the first of which was the 2023 league final when Mayo overcame Galway.
Mayo won three of their four games against Galway in 2023, drawing the other, but as McGrath has mushroomed and developed at the back, so too have their fortunes turned, hence the short odds they’ve been installed on this weekend.
Against Roscommon in the recent provincial semi-final, McGrath lined out in a familiar full-back line with the underrated Sean Fitzgerald and Jack Glynn for company. That’s the same full-back line that started, and won, the 2020 All-Ireland U-20 final for Galway against Dublin.
Padraic Joyce is blessed with scoring talent at the other end of the pitch but if he and Galway are to win the All-Ireland the county craves this year, it could very well come down to this miserly full-back line triumvirate which McGrath has so successfully soldiered.
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