Gaelic Games

Colm O’Rourke fully focused on final step as Meath bid for silverware

Tailteann Cup not a means to an end for Royal boss but ‘a competition that’s worth winning in itself’

Colm O'Rourke in action against Down's Barry Breen during the 1991 All-Ireland final at Croke Park. Photograph: Billy Stickland/Inpho

Paul Keane
Thu Jul 13 2023 - 05:00

Tormented? Colm O’Rourke can’t say his experience against Down in 1991 hit him quite that hard.

“But it does bug me at times all right,” he conceded, 32 years on.

Laid low by pneumonia, the then Meath forward climbed off his sick bed to inspire a memorable All-Ireland final fightback that year which ultimately came up two points short.

A couple of days out from the Tailteann Cup final between the same counties, back at Croke Park, the current Meath manager is reminded of the ending to that season of seasons.

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Meath had needed eight games just to get out of Leinster following their four-in-a-row escapades with Dublin but fate – or a thrilling Down team, depending on your persuasion – eventually intervened.

“Our team doctor was very much against the idea of me playing at all,” recalled O’Rourke of his second-half cameo in that final.

“I had pneumonia. It’s not the sort of thing you take chances with. I was getting better and I’d definitely felt a bit better on the Sunday of the game.

“On the Saturday, I can remember doing a fitness test with Seán Boylan in Páirc Tailteann and I wasn’t able to run. So I had improved a lot in 24 hours. If the final was on the Monday, I would have probably played from the start.”

Considering all the energy expended to get beyond Dublin that year, and the subsequent draw and replay with Wicklow, it was a cruel blow at the end of it all.

“I had suffered badly from tonsillitis and I recall we trained one night and there were a lot of people around, a lot of autographs and it was getting very cold,” said O’Rourke.

“I felt straight away after the training session that it wasn’t a very good idea, when you’re sweating but standing around for maybe an hour on a cold night. I think the next day I remember, about a week before the game, I was beginning to feel bad and then it just got worse. It was just one of those things that happens to come at the wrong time in life.”

Colm O'Rourke, Meath manager, with the Tailteann Cup at Croke Park in Dublin. Photograph: Piaras Ó Mídheach/Sportsfile

For O’Rourke, now 65, that was almost exactly half a lifetime ago. Now he’s the Meath manager himself with Boylan in his backroom team.

None of them, nor anyone associated with Down, could have expected that the counties’ next meeting in an All-Ireland final would be at the lower tier.

“We hit a 10-year cycle where things seemed to go wrong and there didn’t seem to be the talent that we had previously,” said former St Pat’s, Navan, school principal O’Rourke of Meath in the interim.

“We were spoiled for a while. But I think it’s going to come back. I saw it in school too, we had a bad cycle there for a decade with teams.

“I don’t know what it was. Despite the fact that we worked harder at it than ever before, we just didn’t seem to be as successful as we were in the noughties. I think it’s been like that with Meath. But I think the wheel has turned.”

It was a different game back in ‘91 when O’Rourke was playing. An analysis of the amount of passes in Meath’s fourth game against Dublin that season showed that the Royals had hand-passed the ball just 34 times. That figure could be as high as 200 in a game now with kick-passes outnumbered by around three or four to one.

O’Rourke has made no bones about his desire to see Meath kick the ball more again.

“As far as I’m concerned, we should copy Dublin and Kerry and basically do it the same way as they play, I don’t see why not, they are the two most successful teams,” he said.

“We obviously defensively got caught a lot during the league but we have tried and tried and worked hard on that. But if you have three or four new players in your backline, you’re going to struggle to cement it as a group. But we’re getting there and things are working better.”

O’Rourke laughs at the suggestion of gaining some sort of revenge this weekend, for ‘91. Likewise, he isn’t fixating on the potential free pass to next year’s All-Ireland SFC series for the Tailteann Cup champions.

“I’m just really looking at it from the point of view that it’s a competition that’s worth winning in itself,” he said.

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