Full backs are king in the Royal County

PERHAPS - it's only coincidence but the last time Meath had a convincing full back was the last time they won a Leinster title before this year - Mick Lyons was still guv'nor back in 1991. A lot of dust had risen in the square during his decade long reign and when Laois ambushed them in 1992, he shook the dust off his heels for the last time.

It took Sean Boylan four years to find a new one but Darren Fay has emerged and so has a new team of Meath champions. Boylan needed more than a fullback to complete his jigsaw but the absence of Fay would have left a hole at the heart of his defence too big for comfort.

Fay, by his own admission, is still new to the job but he has shown a capacity to learn on the hoof and survive at the same time. A learner and a survivor - the perfect combination for a 20 year old thrown in at the deep end. But he's done more than survive. The best full forwards have come and gone this summer, beaten men, Mayo's John Casey the most important victim of them all.

Only Casey's team mate, the excellent Kevin Cahill, can deprive Fay of an All Star now with one game left in the championship. Meath, it would seem, have found a full back to take them into the next millennium.

Which must be warmly reassuring to their football fans who, traditionally, have had a relationship with their full backs something akin to babies and their security blankets - a comforting presence in times of danger.

"The full back position is to Meath supporters what the out half position is to Welsh rugby supporters," says Meath PRO Brendan Cummins. "It is the position."

Dillon, McGuinness, O'Brien, Quinn, Lyons - that is the roll call of "great" Meath full backs, stretching back to the 1920s when Bill Dillon, of Syddan, was the man in charge. All but one lasted at least 10 years, with fine players like Malt O'Toole and Jim Ryan filling the interregnums between one great and the next.

There may he forwards around who will point out that these men were not the best full backs they ever marked. Others might care to say that one or two were not the most sporting full backs they ever marked, but the five - again, bar one - were all part of Meath teams that won national titles and, because of their longevity, fulfilled at least one of the criteria by which we measure greatness.

Dillon played for ten years (1923-33). His last game for Meath was well chosen: the 1933 national league final against Cavan which they won - Meath's first ever national title. The footballing bloodlines may have gone underground for over half a century but, 63 years later, his grand nephew, Martin O'Connell, stands on the verge of a third All Ireland medal an unprecedented achievement in the county.

Jim "Boiler" McGuinness succeeded Dillon. A plumber by trade and chubby by nature, it is not definitively known if his work or his build, spawned the nickname or both. Boiler played full back on the 1939 team beaten by Kerry in the All Ireland final, the first time that Meath made it to the final.

Brendan Cummins's father Jack was full forward on that team. He faced McGuinness many times at club level and remembered him, says Brendan, as an uncompromising defender.

No surprises there full backs then were licensed to take man and ball and anything else that was going. It was hard to blame them if they did because the reverse also applied full backs then, like rugby full backs now, were obliged to keep their eye on the dropping ball while a parishload of marauding opponents thundered in with a view, perhaps, to bundling him ball and all into the back of the net.

"When you did get possession you had to be able to take the heavy tackles and come through the crowd," recalls Peter McDermott, whose distinguished county career just overlapped with the end of Boiler's. "That was how all these great full backs got their reputations. Big, powerful men who would burst through and clear it downfield - then the cheer would go up. They were the men to ride the storm."

It was taken for granted that full backs of this calibre had, in the GAA patois, "great hands". Not nervous, tentative hands that would spill the ball but solid, strong hands that would lock onto the ball and cement it there. The fielding of Skryne's Paddy O'Brien was so spectacularly faithful that he eventually became known as Paddy `Hands' O'Brien.

Like many other Meath full backs, he played centrefield before dropping back. He spent 13 seasons on the team, 1943-55, the last eight at full back. It was from this position that he won his first - and Meath's first - All Ireland title, beating Cavan in 1949. He won a second in 1954 on the team captained by Peter McDermott.

"You had to be able to take the knocks," he recalls. He did - and he's suffering today. Last week he entered St Vincent's Hospital for X rays on an old war wound. It's not too bad but the pain has forced him to desist from playing golf, his great pleasure, at the age of 71.

"It happened me in Drogheda. I sprung up for a ball and landed on this fellow's back. He was under me and I came down on top of him and fell off and cracked my spine off the butt of a post. It's giving me hell now," he says with a rueful laugh. He's not complaining though: "I have wonderful memories."

Jim Ryan, of Ballinlough, succeeded O'Brien, a good fill back in a time of transition. By the time Meath won another All Ireland, in 1967, Jack Quinn, from the tiny parish of Kilbride, beside Clonee, was the man in situ. His brother, Martin, had preceded him in the Number Three jersey.

Again the hands were solid and the temperament right. "Any fullback has to be fearless. You had to keep your eye on the ball even if someone was rushing in on you so you had to be fearless going for it as well as when you got - if you did get it!"

Quinn played from 1965-75. Mick Lyons first played for Meath in 1979 but it was a couple of years before he consolidated his reputation as a full back. Not a spectacular high fielder despite his height, he played a conservative game and was mobile enough to match most full forwards on the run out for a ball.

Darren Fay is probably a better footballer. Only time will tell whether or not he is a better fullback. If his team win the replay on Sunday, however, he will be well on his way to the pantheon.

Paddy O'Brien says that all great full backs, no matter where they're from, are appreciated in their own counties. He is right.