ALL-IRELAND SFC SEMI-FINAL: Keith Dugganbelieves the county's famed resolve and never-say-die spirit helps give underdogs Meath a fighting chance against Kerry in tomorrow's All-Ireland semi-final
TREVOR GILES sounded the first note of unease. This was in the underworld of Croke Park and Meath had just played their way into another All-Ireland final. What had happened up above on the field had left everybody slightly stunned. Meath had not simply beaten Kerry, the reigning All-Ireland champions; they had sent them packing in a manner that seemed indecorous.
One of the most vaunted full-forward lines in the country had scored a meagre total of five points. The Kerry defence seemed powerless to prevent Meath men from streaming through their ranks with impunity. Páidí Ó Sé, the most frenetic of all sideline men, had no choice but to sit down and watch the second half play itself out through a long and farcical conclusion.
By the last then ten minutes, the Kepak faithful, up on the Hill, amused themselves by offering derisory cheers as the Meath lads played ‘keeps’, chucking the football around the house as if they were involved in some kind of private game. And as soon as Giles left the field, he was bothered by the manner of the victory.
“Silly football,” he scolded as a few of us stood around. “Ollie , maybe, Darren and Mark O’Reilly,” was all he would concede when it was put to him that Meath had put on quite a show. “But we missed a lot in the second half and then we started messing around with the football. The crowd gave us great support but then they started cheering all those passes and we started playing to it and it was just silly stuff.”
It was as if Giles could see omens in the sky that day. Showboating to victory has never been the Meath way. Stealth, toughness and daring have been their chief weapons. Something did not quite add up about that afternoon and Giles, who always brought a physician’s calm to the most turbulent of championship afternoons, knew it.
The Skryne man added one more remark that would prove darkly prophetic. Thinking ahead to Meath’s opponents in the All-Ireland final, he said: “I’m sure Galway loved to see that.”
He was right.
Three weeks later, it was Galway supporters who were entertaining themselves with mock cheers as the maroon team had the freedom of Croke Park. That was 2001 and Meath have not been back in an All-Ireland final since.
ECHOES OF THATsemi-final are bound to carry through to tomorrow's reprise and although Kerry have had the depth of talent and ambition to reinvent themselves several times over since that startling collapse, one thing that has rarely left Meath football is that sense of practicality Giles represented.
The odds on Meath being among the last four teams in this year’s All-Ireland would have been fairly attractive before the championship. Their annihilation by Limerick in last year’s qualifiers saw the end of Colm Coyle’s reign. Eamonn O’Brien was the latest man to step forward to try to fulfil what was beginning to appear like a futile mission: replacing Seán Boylan.
The Meath men were fairly ordinary in the second tier of the league: competitive but not exactly setting the world alight. As expected, they exited the Leinster championship after their meeting with Dublin.
They put it up to the Leinster champions and the place was full but as the song goes, it just wasn’t like the old days anymore. It was not like those elemental Dublin-Meath meetings of earlier decades. Meath had been game and just two points separated them at the finish but the statistics told a different story.
Dublin had struck 17 wides: the metropolitans had conducted the game from start to finish.
And yet the silence around the hotspots of Dublin football has been deafening since the juggernaut was stripped bare in just minutes on that cruel day against Kerry.
All the other fancies and dark horses have fallen along the way and even Tyrone, the All-Ireland champions, are finished for the summer. Only Meath stand between another Cork and Kerry All-Ireland derby. How did the situation arise?
“One thing that has carried through Meath football has been that kind of never-say-die attitude,” says Jody Devine, the former Meath attacker. “When I started out with Meath, there were fellas like Colm O’Rourke, Brian Stafford and Bernie Flynn and they would have instilled this thing that you never lie down, you keep on playing until the end regardless of what is happening on the scoreboard.
“It was an unspoken thing really and it came from the training ground. We put everything into training, everything was done properly and with intensity and that carried through to games.
“Over time, Meath developed this reputation for coming back from nowhere or getting late scores, of being hard to put away. And I think that it was something that other teams came to believe and fear as much as anything else. But that thing of never quitting was something that was drummed into you from an early age.”
Devine played a central role in one of the most breathtaking examples of Meath’s propensity to make the most of a grim situation.
In the first round of the 1997 Leinster championship, Meath played a Kildare side whose ambitions were fuelled by the return of Mick O’Dwyer. The previous September, Meath had wrestled a prized All-Ireland title out of Mayo hands in a gripping and controversial two-match All-Ireland series.
Now, back in Croke Park, against the men wearing the Daz white of Kildare, they were on the rack. A fiercely-contested match had gone into extra-time and after the first period, the Lilywhites had blown the contest wide open. They were six points to the good.
Seán Boylan called Devine in from the dug-out and on cue, the Seneschalstown man delivered one of the great Croke Park virtuoso displays, hitting six points in a row with flabbergasting self-assurance.
MEATH, IT WOULDhave been fair to say, were not the national darlings at that time: few tears would have been shed had they gone out. And yet who could fail to admire their limitless self-belief in this instance?
“You have to keep going. I suppose we were six points down but people forgot that there was a big strong wind blowing towards the Canal End that day. Kildare had had it in the first half. We knew we could use it so we felt we were still there and that we had a chance. We actually went a point up and Kildare were awarded a fairly questionable free late on to get a draw.”
It was a classic Meath rally. As a minor and under-21, Devine had been coached by Mattie Kerrigan. He knew of the Meath team of 1967 by hearsay and Kerrigan preached the same message that he would later hear so often from Seán Boylan. It felt as if playing for Meath carried an underwritten obligation of sticking to the task, even when things were not apparently going well. Kerrigan knew all about that.
At half-time in the ’67 final, things could not have been going much worse against Cork. Meath may have trailed by only three points but so desultory was their performance that they looked demoralised.
“Their second half transformation was so unexpected that it still seems incredible,” wrote Paddy Downey, the Irish Times GAA correspondent, in the following morning’s paper.
“True, it was assisted by an injury which rendered Cork’s brilliant midfielder Mick Burke virtually helpless 10 minutes before half-time; nevertheless it was a rally which for grit and guts and unconquerable spirit surpassed anything I have seen in a final.”
Grit and guts and unconquerable spirit: it could be the epitaph of Meath football. And for the last number of years, it was threatening to become so.
Last summer’s humiliation down in Limerick was simply not supposed to happen to Meath teams and it seemed particularly significant that it happened under Colm Coyle, perhaps the most unconquerable of all Boylan’s lieutenants down the years.
A year earlier, Coyle had surpassed expectations by leading a young team to the All-Ireland semi-final, where they fell flat against Cork. The nature of the Limerick defeat prompted him to step down. Most county teams would have taken a season or two just to find their feet again.
“It is as if Meath have discovered what they are about again over the course of this All-Ireland,” says Martin Carney.
As part of the Mayo backroom team, he observed first hand how the old Meath stubbornness reasserted itself over the course of their All-Ireland quarter-final meeting.
“It was commendable how they applied themselves to that game and just wouldn’t let it go. I think of it as a kind of ‘stickability’ that Meath teams of the past had.
“There was no real sign of life in this Meath team for much of the year but as they went through the qualifiers, it was as if something fell into place for them and they found that stubbornness that might have been missing for a few years. They responded extremely well to the setbacks they encountered playing against Mayo – not scoring for the first 15 minutes and then being hit by a goal in the second half when they looked to have found their stride. They just kept hitting back.”
Carney played against Meath teams many times during his career with Donegal and Mayo and later observed them in his role as analyst for RTÉ. In 1988, Mayo were denied a place in the All-Ireland final by a team that came to embody the core Meath traits.
“What the Meath game has is a lovely amalgam of hardness and finesse. There is a physical hardness about the way they play the game and there is also a high emphasis on skill. At their best, they managed to blend both in a way that has made them extremely tough to beat.
“I think there is a cockiness there too; players like Graham Geraghty had it. I think what happened for a few years in Meath is that there was a sort of desperation crept in after Seán Boylan left and then an I-stepped-out-again situation developed with the managerial post. And it is beginning to settle down now and there are definite signs that this Meath team has tapped into that stubbornness.”
IF IT IS true that Meath’s flair for making life awkward is back, if the old never-say-die-spirit has returned, then as Jody Devine wryly remarks, “We’ll need plenty of it on Sunday.”
Meath are cold outsiders going into this semi-final against Kerry. Their very presence is testament to their capacity for bouncing back from adversity in a way that few counties can emulate. With 20 minutes remaining in the match against Limerick last year, Meath trailed by a whopping 17 points. Rarely has any team inflicted a blacker day on Meath football.
And yet it is often forgotten that bedraggled though they were, Meath somehow found the will and resolve to rattle off three goals in the closing quarter of the match. The final score was 4-12 to 4-3: a weird score but ultimately a nine-point loss, which seems almost respectable in comparison to some of the cricket scores that have been posted this summer. Even in the midst of that deluge, something of the Meath reflex to keep on counter- punching – even while on the canvas – was detectable.
Eight years after they dismissed Kerry in a fashion that was alien to their nature, Meath meet the Kingdom again. As Devine admits, there is an acknowledgement that Meath will need certain things to go their way if they are to have a shout against Kerry. What the Kingdom side did to Dublin is bound to be at the back of all Meath minds this weekend.
“We will need to start better than against Mayo and maybe hope that Kerry don’t get the same start as they did. There are a lot of ifs and buts.”
But the crucial thing is that Meath once more convey the sense they are there to have a go, that come what may they will do themselves justice in how they go about winning or losing the match and that above all, they will carry no fear. Meath may be the poor relation in this encounter but they are not without hope.
“Sure we always have hope,” says Devine.
“We always think we have a chance.”
