Tom Humphriestalks to Meath legends Seán Boylan, Darren Fay and Trevor Giles about the great Meath versus Dublin battles of the past.
WHO KNOWS what succour the GAA will take from the attendance in Croke Park tomorrow? The chances are that the Dubs will come in their sky blue droves as usual and that possibly they will be a tad late even if their hurlers are a tempting appetiser.
But the Dubs will be there in immense numbers for the start of Year Fourteen since their county last won an All-Ireland or even appeared in a final. But the Dubs would be there in large numbers anyway. Memories of the eternal grudge match with Meath are fading.
And Meath? Who knows? A residual of the faithful will make the journey for old times sake, but the years post Seán Boylan have been thin. Meath haven’t beaten Dublin in eight years and talk of old rivalries and neighbourly feuding grows wearisome when you keep on losing and aren’t expected to win.
Two years ago, Meath mustered a draw against Dublin on the first weekend in June. 78,002 people turned up to watch and we filled the backpages with teary-eyed reminiscences of 1991 and told each other that there was nothing like Dublin and Meath to get the blood stirred.
The sequel was a flop, but Meath went off down the highways and byways of the qualifiers and presented themselves again as All-Ireland semi-finalists losing a little abjectly to Cork, but doing enough to make us think that the Leinster championship would soon be as vigourously contested as in days of yore.
That drawn game of ’07 gave a distinct sense of drama to the lack lustre early days of the championship. Since the introduction of the back-door system, the months of May and June have become a listless exercise in burning down the barn to clear out a few mice, but for a little while two years ago we came to believe that the ennui could be banished by the revival of a Balkan-style feud in Leinster.
Fast forward a year though and Meath played three championship games in 2008, beating Carlow soundly, losing a weird one to Wexford and slumping into a corner against Limerick. This year’s league produced two wins. Meath may be a side in recession. They may be a side on the edge of a new era.
Like a lot of players, Trevor Giles took a couple of years away from the games when the playing days ended, but he is going to Croke Park tomorrow – albeit not sensing the excitement that marked Dublin and Meath games in the time when the rivalry was blue chip.
“I suppose in Meath the good times for the football ended at a time when the good times really started economically. People got a bit distracted. They were after the second car and the summer house and all that and if the team wasn’t going well it wasn’t life or death. They’d had plenty of good years.
“For a long time, the main rivalries we had were Cork and Dublin and if you got over either of them there was a good shot at an All-Ireland. I suppose Meath aren’t at that level just now and people are waiting to see what’s there.”
Life and death. The back-door system has removed that component from Meath’s clashes with Dublin.
Many of the caveats hovering over this Meath team for instance spring from last summer when Meath were expected to build on the unexpected success of 2007, when in reality they should have beaten Dublin the first day but went on to mop up a summer’s worth of vital experience.
Against Wexford, they lost a 10-point lead in the last quarter when suddenly they seemed to have the wrong team on the pitch. By the time they faced Limerick, the appetite was gone.
In the old days, it was impossible to imagine a Meath team first letting Dublin off the hook as they did in ’07 and secondly letting Wexford go free a year later. To exit tamely from the qualifiers, the Meath of old would have needed medical certificates testifying to their complete and utter exhaustion. Even in 1991, when they left their guts on the floor in Croke Park in beating Dublin, they white-knuckled it all the way to an All-Ireland final.
Darren Fay graduated top senior in the class of 1996. Like the rest of the county, he had watched Dublin beat Meath by 10 points in the Leinster final the year before. As one Dublin player described the game afterwards, “we just knew this was it, we were putting them away for a few years”.
Seán Boylan reconstructed his entire team and beat Dublin by a couple of points the following year. What Fay misses is the high-wire feeling that attended those games.
“That was my first year and I know the whole county was talking about nothing for weeks beforehand. We had watched Dublin win an All-Ireland against Tyrone the previous year. We’d never had any fear of them in Meath and now it was being put up to us to put them back in the box. That was all that mattered.
“There was never a game in 1996 when we looked beyond the next 70 minutes, but with Dublin especially it was the be all and the end all. If we won, it was glory. If we lost, we were gone and maybe gone for a few years.”
Meath have misplaced that backs to the wall, fight or flight feeling in recent times.
“I think,” says Darren Fay of last year’s misadventure, “that in 2007 in the league we were very conscious of how hard we had to work. We said it all the time and by the time we got to the Dublin match that was in our heads, that work ethic.
“Last year I think we took it for granted a bit. We worked hard in the first half against Wexford, but it slipped and it’s hard to get it back again when a team gets the run on you. When there was no back door at all no Meath team ever worried about working hard enough.”
Seán Boylan has a slightly different and more benign thesis on last year. “I could be wrong now, but I think the fellas were putting players on with a view to getting a look at them for the next day. And Wexford starting causing them trouble then around the middle. There are a lot of good players there for Meath now and maybe they would feel they have been hard done by in the last few years, but they have the chance now to stand up and be a Meath team and I think that would mean a lot to them and a lot to the county.”
Are Dublin and Meath an irrelevant sideshow in the footballing summer? Fay and Giles detect a distinct fall off in interest among Royal supporters, but Boylan, perhaps because the man’s enthusiasm is itself so extraordinarily infectious, feels the hunger to battle is still there.
“Dublin and Meath will always be Dublin and Meath. I was talking to David Hickey yesterday and we were saying that the weather we have had this week. It’s been Leinster final weather. And if that doesn’t remind people of the history and the great day experience that a Dublin and Meath match is then nothing will. It’s the sort of weather that Dublin and Meath played out so many great Leinster games in.
“I don’t think there will ever be a Meath team that goes out on to the field against Dublin not fully engaged because there is a back door or whatever. It still means what it means to fellas.”
That history is impossibly rich. Dublin beat Meath in the Leinster final of 1974 on their way to a breakout All-Ireland.
“Struggled past” is the phrase Kevin Heffernan likes to use for the occasion of beating a Meath team. They met again in the Leinster final of 1976 and 1977, in five finals in the 1980s and another five in the ’90s. They played 22 games of championship football from 1974 to the end of the century.
They were big time.
They were box office.
They were compulsive viewing and they were very relevant to the outcome of so many All-Ireland series. Now they have to fight for the right to grab the nation by the lapels.
Down in Killarney, though, when Kerry take on Cork a couple of hours earlier there will be a sense at least that the paying customer is watching two live contenders for this year’s All-Ireland. The familiarity of the pairing is compensated for by the thought that Cork incrementally are getting there and that in Munster anything is possible.
Dublin and Meath have yet to prove that they aren’t just a couple of beaten dockets living on past glories. Dublin haven’t been in an All-Ireland final in 14 years.
Meath’s taste of success is more recent, but, inevitably perhaps, their downswing has been more precipitous. The gifted generation which Boylan brought along in 1996 for that glorious coup of a summer have gone and Meath are back on their traditional resources. No boy wonders.
“The club scene has never been that hectic in Meath,” says Giles. “Navan O’Mahony’s would be the exception right now I suppose, but generally it would be the same now as always. What we depended on always was having three or four players who were exceptional and then a good team of players behind who were of the same standard as each other and very tough and passionate about it.
“At under-21 we ran Dublin close and they went to an All-Ireland semi-final. At minor level I suppose we have had decent teams and have a good team this year. And St Pat’s in Navan would have been a good vehicle for players of that age.
“In terms of a Graham Geraghty, a fella that is exceptional at senior club level from the age of 17 or so, we aren’t seeing anything like that.
“We need to be a bit more like Kerry. Regardless of the underage system, they manage to produce one exceptional fella a year. Instead of just working on 30 or 40 young fellas maybe look at pushing a very small number, hot-housing them.”
Darren Fay identifies another difficulty. Living and playing for Trim he has seen the population of the town double during the boom times, a growth reflected in places like Ashbourne and Ratoath and Dunshaughlin, towns that are maybe half a decade away from having a serious input to the senior team. Meanwhile, as a man who enjoys rugby, he notices traffic going the other way.
“There is no rugby team in Trim, but places like Meath are where rugby is making the headway and fair play to them. If I was in charge of the GAA it is something I would be looking at and I would be worried.
“There’s a lot of fellas now missing training or matches because they have rugby. The GAA is a bit complacent there.”
Meath come to Croke Park tomorrow with a strong hand, but a weakfish looking bench. They look across the field at a Dublin team as wholly reconstructed as Meath themselves were back in 1996. Talking to Giles and Fay and Boylan they all sense the same opportunity that all Meath teams feel when they play in Croke Park.
“But,” says Giles, “that’s not a thread which goes on forever. I don’t think Meath will ever go to being a backwater team. There’s an awful lot of things could be done short term in Meath football to make it better.
“For now, though, we need a win against Dublin, to get the excitement back and the self-belief and the passion and to get the rivalry going again.”
The GAA needs that rivalry now like a desert needs water.
