GAELIC GAMES LEINSTER SFC SEMI-FINAL:For the first time in nine years Meath have a chance of dethroning Dublin. Seán Moranlooks at why it has taken so long to revive the glory days

LEINSTER CHIEF executive Michael Delaney first made the point nearly five years ago when reviewing the third successive year in which the province had failed to provide a single All-Ireland football semi-finalist.

“We could do with Meath becoming competitive again,” he said, talking to this newspaper, “because that would put more bite into Dublin and raise standards. We have to realise that Kerry will always be somewhere near the top but the Ulster counties may struggle when their current teams have gone.”

Tomorrow Meath may have reached the stage when for the first time in nine years they do more than establish competitiveness and actually beat Dublin in the championship.

In the short term that would be bad news for the champions, who are on the trail of a sixth provincial title, but in the long run a high-quality rivalry in Leinster – such as the current Cork-Kerry one in Munster and less recently, Tyrone-Armagh in Ulster – would go some of the way to rehabilitating the province’s apparently moribund All-Ireland prospects.

Meath have been a cautionary tale for any counties presuming on having become permanent contenders. In the 15 years from the mid-1980s they were the most successful county in football, winning more All-Irelands – four – than Kerry or anyone else.

Seán Boylan brought two separate teams through in that time. But at their apparent height, thrashing Kerry in the 2001 All-Ireland semi-final, they lost the formula. Leinster hasn’t been won since and the county has drifted out of serious contention despite reaching a couple of All-Ireland semi-finals through the qualifier route.

Tomorrow Nigel Crawford, starting on the bench, is the only survivor from the last team to lift the Sam Maguire 11 years ago. Slowly and inexorably the link with success has frayed to snapping point.

“The supply of players is cyclical,” according to the county’s former footballer of the year, Trevor Giles. “The really, really top players who come through – the Colm O’Rourkes, Bernard Flynns and John McDermotts – I’m not sure you can coach them to that level. They just come along and Meath always had four or five of them until the supply dried up.

“The county board has probably been a bit conservative but development squads and all that goes with them cost a lot of money. The Meath County Board has to make a decision soon on how they’re going to proceed in the future.”

Another feature of the good years was success at under-age. The minor teams of the early 1990s and a subsequent under-21 side won All-Irelands. That too dried up. The 2002 minors reached a final, losing to Derry, but that was the extent of it.

St Patrick’s in Navan, under the direction of former All-Ireland winner Colm O’Rourke, has been a beacon of promise in an otherwise gloomy landscape. The four most established names in tomorrow’s attack, Joe Sheridan and the full forwards Stephen Bray, Shane O’Rourke and Cian Ward are all graduates of Hogan Cup successes (the first achieved in 2000 against a St Pat’s, Armagh, team featuring future All Stars Tyrone’s Seán Cavanagh and Armagh’s Ronan Clarke).

Matt Kerrigan is a respected figure in Meath. An All-Ireland winner in 1967 with wide managerial experience, he has watched the decline of the past decade and attributes it partly to the premature passing of the All-Ireland winning teams of the 1990s.

“It’s a combination of the end of the 1996-’99 team and injuries ended a couple of careers, like Trevor Giles’, early and the failure of the under-age system over the past to produce the stand-out players they had back in the 1980s and ’90s or even ones who could compete against Dublin and Kildare.”

There is a question about what the emphasis should be at under-age level. In Kerry the attitude to minor teams is not whether they win All-Irelands but whether they produce likely senior players. Obviously if they can do both, so much the better.

Giles is mindful of this evolution.

“Colm Cooper came into the Kerry team and the following year Declan O’Sullivan. A couple of years later Kieran Donaghy emerged. Then Tommy Walsh. That’s a brilliant player coming through on a nearly annual basis. As a county do you focus on the individuals or on producing successful teams?”

Kerrigan, on the other hand, believes under-age achievement is an important part of the developmental process.

“Maybe the players weren’t available in Meath. Most of the current team have been around for a while but they’ve been to a couple of All-Ireland semi-finals and that experience is a help. But you really need your under-age teams getting to Leinster finals and our under-21s, in particular, have a bad record over the past number of years. When young players aren’t experiencing that kind of run at under-age level it’s harder for them to develop and even to be seen.”

Another issue that had to be addressed was the epochal change of management needed when Boylan retired after 22 years and four All-Irelands.

“I suppose it’s hard to fill the boots,” says Kerrigan. “It’s the same thing as happened in Kerry when Mick O’Dwyer went. It’s hard for a manager coming in on the back of Seán Boylan’s record. For one, he wouldn’t always get the length of time he might need to build a team. It can take three or four years to do that, similar to what Séamus McEnaney has been doing in Monaghan. He’s been there six years and it looks now as if he might be able to deliver something.

“But supporters and even officials might be looking for more immediate success rather than giving a manager time to develop. Colm Coyle did solid work for two years and brought in a lot of the players and got them to an All-Ireland semi-final and I’d say that they’re benefiting from that this year.”

Another important development of the past 10 years that has coincided with Meath’s ebbing from prominence is the introduction of the qualifier system. For a while it appeared as if Meath’s blood-and-thunder characteristic was struggling to deal with the possibilities of second chances. Giles, however dismisses this. “That wouldn’t have been a major factor. In the first few years of the back door we were playing teams like Fermanagh but we had too high an opinion of ourselves and didn’t take it seriously enough. We got the hang of it eventually and have reached All-Ireland semi-finals in recent times.”

Tomorrow for the first time in eight or nine years Meath are widely perceived to have a chance of dethroning the Leinster champions of the past five years. An impressive attack has helped to mask frailties farther back but the mediocrity of much of Dublin’s quarter-final against Wexford has fired hopes that this could be a year of change.

The relationship between the counties has seen supremacy established in sustained periods. Dublin have won the last four meetings back to 2002 and Meath the previous four back to 1996. Has the time arrived for a new shift? “There’s big optimism about Sunday but I’m not sure how well placed it is,” says Giles. “There’s a lot of fellas who haven’t beaten Dublin in championship in three or four attempts. But there comes a time when you just have to say, ‘enough of that’ and when enough fellas say that, you have a chance.”