The battle of the shrunken giants

Dublin v Meath: Tom Humphries talks to Dublin's Shane Ryan about getting momentum from tomorrow's match and the new mood in the camp under Paul Caffrey.

Strange how distant they have become. Once upon a time in the east, they ruled the prairies and split the spoils. Dublin and Meath formed the eternal subplots to each others yarns. They were the neighbours who wished each other nothing but bad cess. They feuded like rival ranchers. They filled any ring they faced each other in.

Reared for something different, Shane Ryan came in at the end. He remembers being at the fourth game of that epic series in 1991. Young and blithe. It came back to him this week when he saw an ad on television.

"I remember the fourth game, when we lost, and turning to my Mum and asking her why she was upset, were there not going to be more of these games? Was that the end of it?"

It almost was. They went about their work cheek by jowl for a while longer. Dublin had a little run of Leinsters, and then in 1995 administered a fine beating to Meath. At the time it was thought that the 1995 episode had an end-of-era quality about it. Dublin putting Meath away for a few years to come as the Dubs graduated to an All-Ireland and returned to the business of top-table rivalries.

Meath never went away though. They circled the drain in 1995 but never got sucked down. They won the next year's All-Ireland. They were still sturdy when Shane Ryan began wearing sky blue on Sundays. He'd have been forgiven for thinking that the hurdle which is Meath would be as central to his hopes and aspirations as they had been to a generation of his predecessors.

Dublin were a street behind Meath by 1999 and Ryan sat on the bench and seethed as Ollie Murphy went to the well again and again for 1-5. Meath barged on out of Leinster with room to spare. They went on and won another All-Ireland.

In May of that year, Ryan had played wing forward for Dublin hurlers on a team which got to within a point of Wexford down in Nowlan Park. Looking back over the summer, it was difficult to distinguish which path held more promise. Football had the history. Hurling had his heart.

His background, famously, is as drenched in the GAA as it is possible to be. But the heritage he was handed down was stick-shaped.

"I suppose growing up it would have been all hurling. From the nursery on Saturday's in Mearnogs to pucking about with my Mam and Dad, we always played hurling. It wasn't till I was about 16 or 17 that I got to be any good at football. I started taking more of an interest in it then."

He took the path more travelled. It would be 2002, though, before Ryan experienced the visceral pleasure which a Dub feels when beating Meath in front of the Hill. It was a year of novelty and whim in the city and, had things been different, Dublin might have surfed the good vibrations all the way to an All-Ireland.

You know the rest. The quick souring of Tommy Lyons's puss.

Meath and Dublin resigned themselves to irrelevance a short while afterwards.

And so, fast-forward to this sunny afternoon in the strange, Lilliput world of St Joseph's junior national school in Ballymun. Little desks and small copybooks and Ryan's Communion class still buzzing from their big day. From the yard you can scarcely see what's left of the old towers. Ballymun is getting smaller. The school itself is downsizing this summer. Ryan sits in the staff room and looks forward to a fixture which used to be contested by giants but is now itself downsized.

"It's hard to say where we both are at the moment," he says. "Neither team is obviously ahead of the other. It could just be a dog-fight. There's a lot depending on it for both teams. Whoever wins on Sunday would expect to see themselves in a Leinster final and hoping to be giving a decent showing. It's easy to say that now. There's another challenge in the semi-final, of course, but at the moment the idea is that winning puts you in that position."

It doesn't take an afternoon of thumbing through old back pages to recall what can happen to a team which gets a result or two on the spin in the early summer. Especially a side with a first-year manager. Those sort of sides keep winning All-Irelands. Dublin were that sort of side when they scraped the sky three years ago.

"The potential is there. You get a bit of momentum going and it's amazing what can happen. In 2002 we struggled against Wexford. You wouldn't have given us a chance. I remember later in the summer going in against Armagh. We saw them struggle against Sligo in the previous game. I remember thinking it would be a lot easier than it turned out to be. You could tell by my performance. It caught me. I wasn't very good. Every year, though, there's a team that comes through. Even look at Fermanagh last year. Or Mayo. We'd like to kick-start that on Sunday."

THERE'S LITTLE left in the Dublin and Meath relationship. Familiarity fuelled the old contempt. Apart from three championship matches, Ryan thinks he's played Meath once in a challenge game during his six-year lease of a Dublin jersey. Still, the residual benefit is that whoever wins tomorrow will take away a nice little bundle of morale and confidence to feed off for a few weeks.

"That's what we need," he says, and sighs.

Over the past decade or so he has become one of those footballers which every team needs, a player who has made himself more than the sum of his parts. On the Hill, pot-bellies rest against the terrace railings and the experts who own the bellies point to the deficiencies in Ryan's game. The flaws diminish all the time, however, and his overwhelming honesty and work rate have become his signature.

This summer his engine and his will have seen him moved to midfield in the absence of Darren Magee. He happily concedes that he won't pull down many balls over the head of a six-foot-six rival, but he'll be in the shake-up for everything else, he'll bust up play and he'll come out with a ball close to his chest and he'll give it to somebody wearing the same colour jersey.

For the bulk of the winter he has looked the part. Dublin jolted Longford out of the Leinster championship a few weeks ago and Ryan retains the midfield job for this weekend. In fact everyone gets to keep their post. A new era of contentment?

"It's subconscious, the benefit you get from being in an unchanged team. When you think about it, it's great to have that bit of security. I've done my share on the bench and I know that for the lads who aren't playing it's tough seeing no changes in the side, but sometimes it's good for a team when players work without being worried all the time about their place. We have competition for places, but the continuity is good for a game like this."

Team changes were the starting point for, and subsequently the hallmark of, the crumbling Lyons administration. Pillar Caffrey's reign has a different flavour. Less paranoia. More voices.

"Well, it's like any new face, except in Pillar's case he's not completely new to us, but there's a different approach. It's fresh. None of us knew what to expect. We have different inputs from Paul Clarke and Brian Talty now. They have been brilliant additions to the set-up. The lads have their input. The players get a lot of input. Tommy liked to do a lot of things himself. Now we get input from a lot of sources.

"The last year or so with Tommy was kind of tough. Things weren't going well on the pitch. When things aren't good on the pitch it always seems as if things are worse off the pitch. You get to wonder what came first, the bad results or the rumours you hear about trouble in the camp. Still, this is Pillar's first year. Compare it to Tommy's first year. Time will tell! "

There's plenty of story to be unravelled yet, but even now in the introductory chapters Dublin are looking less tense and more relaxed than at any time in the past couple of years. As befits a player who gives the team some of its pulse, Ryan takes the mood of the camp home with him.

"When things are going well it's great, there's nothing better. If things are going bad, if you're dropped off the team or losing form, it's hard to get out of that slump. You want to get out, you want to get back playing a little club stuff where it's not so pressured.

"I suppose sometimes I let it affect me a bit much. I try to stay as positive as I can, but sometimes you can't help but take it home with you. You go home and you feel a bit down.

"Prime example. This year in the league we had a terrible defeat to Cork, we played so badly, we got an awful hammering, couldn't help wondering if we were going anywhere. We don't seem to play well against Cork any year. Maybe I should just put it down to Cork, but it gets to you."

Occasional mishaps and dismantlements like that will spook Dublin more tomorrow than any history with their neighbours. Ryan is part of a team looking for its own personality. If they find a reliable way to express themselves, anything is possible.

"We believe that. We know it's just a few games and things can change. I remember against Meath in 1999, I didn't play. Meath went on to win an All-Ireland. I didn't start, but in 2001 I came on after 10 minutes, Martin Cahill got concussed. It's terrible to take delight out of somebody's injury. I got on though. I felt we had a chance to win. We nearly did. We were very close. I think we could have or should have. The next year we beat them. Things change quickly."

Things change and things remain the same. Hurling stills takes up a large space in his heart. When laments are sung about the state of the game in Dublin, Shane Ryan's name takes up almost as many verses as Conal Keaney's. He shares the sense of unfinished business.

"I'd like to think I'd hurl for Dublin again. I hate the idea of finishing my career and not having done it again. I only ever played one championship game for Dublin as a hurler. I'd love to. The hope is there.

"As I get older I'm less able to do more. It would have to be one game or the other. There's no way at the moment that I'd stop playing football with things being so positive at the moment, but equally I hate the idea of finishing my career not having played hurling. "

It is the afternoon of the Parnell Park Mutiny. He doesn't know what is coming down the chute, but the management of the hurling team is a topic which interests him.

"I played in DCU for one year under Nicky English. I was hugely impressed with him. I'd love to play with him. That was before he went to Tipperary. We saw what he did there. He's done it all as a player, he's done it all as a manager. He coached me for that year and that would be the type of fella you'd love to play for. I don't know if he has an interest. He'd be the man who could bring Dublin out of the doldrums."

For now, though, hurling is on that list of Things To Do which he has pinned in his brain. Before then he has a job to find when his school shrinks this summer. And he has work to do when the shrunken giants get together again tomorrow. Once more, for the good times.