O'Brien speaks fluent Meath

TOM HUMPHRIEStalks to Eamonn O'Brien, a man who exudes that quiet, non-expressive but distinct quality which we think of as . . . Meathness

FROM THE chaos? Calm. After the deluge? Eamonn O’Brien. Sometimes even the most derelict county boards don’t get what they want. They get what they need.

You’ll remember the autumn of 2008 and the unfolding embarrassment of the process to find a new manager for the Meath footballers. Just a few years after the serene and golden reign of Seán Boylan had ended the county he loved so well slipped back into banana republic politics.

Luke Dempsey was offered the job and then it was taken away. Luke took the high road out of the Royal County looking back once in anger at the stumblebums of the board. In the end the job went to a man who had enjoyed club success with modest Rathkenny, a man who had been a quiet lieutenant in the Boylan days. Eamonn O’Brien.

He hadn’t much by way of profile but to commend him was the fact only a man who loved his county deeply and who wanted the job sincerely would have endured the slings and arrows of Meath’s selection process.

The irony of Meath’s blazers making themselves look like a confederacy of dunces in picking a manager was that Eamonn O’Brien’s first and only task has been to present them with the success they hardly deserve. He has delivered. An All-Ireland semi-final last year. A Leinster title this year. For a county coming out of footballing recession things have been good. Redolent too of better times. Subtract the controversy from the end of the Leinster final and you have an old-style Meath resurrection, a team coming back from a death whose finality they refused to accept.

OF COURSE nobody is perfect. O’Brien was unable to legislate for the inexplicable lack of traditional Meath intensity which his side brought to last year’s tedious semi-final with Kerry. Nor was the grotesque, unusual, bizarre and unprecedented finish to the Leinster final of his making or to his taste. Through it all however, he has emerged as a thoughtful and steadfast addition to the gallery of county managers, a man who exudes that quiet. non-expressive but distinct quality which we think of as Meathness.

Of the Leinster final? He is happy to let things flicker out. Will it affect Meath in the way it seemed to affect Louth? “I don’t know. Time will tell. I look at these things philosophically. Simple. Something happens and you move on. If you dwell on it you give it more power than it should have. If that works I don’t know. Our lads went back to their clubs the week after the Leinster final and that was it. They were back into that. When they came back to us we were getting ready for an all-Ireland quarter-final.”

Did he know as soon as the game ended this was going to be a cloud which would hang over Leinster football for a while, raining in particular on Meath’s parade. “I didn’t know. Not immediately. It wasn’t of our making. We have to deal with that. Hopefully we will deal with it well and we will move on.”

ONE THING is clear. Eamonn O’Brien speaks fluent Meath. Stuff happens. Get over it. The pitch is the place for eloquence. From Walterstown originally, he is now decamped to Dunboyne but his franchise success within Meath football has been in somehow levitating the Rathkenny club to a height they had not previously experienced and keeping them from receding to a depth with which they were all too familiar.

And prior to that there were his years as a sorcerer’s apprentice. “I came into the Meath set-up at the end of 1995. and I was there from ’95/’96 til 2002 or 2003. I was lucky. We had two all-Irelands and 2001 when we were beaten. And we lost a Leinster final at the time before the back door.”

To come in after being dispatched so coldly in 1995 by Dublin and to enjoy an All-Ireland win the following September must have been an experience of condensed learning. “It was my charm that changed things!”, he says with a quiet and self-deprecating laugh. “No! We had a new team that year. A lot of fellas gone. You would learn so much working with Seán though. As a manager he was different and unique and great with people. Once he believed in somebody he believed in them. They knew that. Once he saw something in you, he believed. Otherwise you had to prove yourself. He trusted his players. It’s hard to put your finger on what Seán had but maybe you’re not meant to be able to explain it.”

He is hopeful part of Boylan’s philosophy and style must have percolated into his own personality but he doesn’t go seeking the evidence. “I don’t like comparing people. I’m different, he’s different. I can’t pretend to be Seán. Hopefully though some of the things have sifted in and some of them will come naturally. Maybe my own talents might emerge that I am not aware of.”

When he took the bainisteoir bib he says he set no specific targets. In a job where tenure is grudgingly doled out a year at a time that was possibly the wisest course. Meath were coming from a long way back, the long road from the evening in 2008 when Limerick hammered them in the first round of the qualifier series.

He found early on that players had changed significantly, the closure on a process which he noted beginning as far back as 1995. They knew what was needed and what was right and wrong in terms of preparing a team. They rubbed shoulders socially with professionals, rugby players in particular and the cross-pollination of expertise left footballers with big expectations of their own management.

“Players expect an approach to an amateur game that is as professional as possible . . . I don’t think I spoke to them about what they expected from me but from them I asked we put Meath football back where we would all like it to be. I was asking for a commitment to do that. Hopefully, we would set standards week in and week out that would help us to achieve that.”

If there was a difficulty with executing that simple plan it lay in the county’s resources. Blessed with some superior talents the well was still shallow. “You are always looking for talent. We felt there was enough talent around to be able to compete at a high level. If we didn’t believe there wasn’t enough to win an all-Ireland we wouldn’t be in it. You have to have a few things going for you though.”

LAST SUMMER they lost a couple of fellas to injuries but did reasonably well coming through the back door and getting a favourable wind in terms of draws (Waterford, Westmeath, Roscommon, Limerick and Mayo). Kevin O’Reilly and Shane O’Rourke were unavailable all year, however, and as the altitude increased and the air got thinner they missed them more.

“In hindsight we would be relatively happy with the progress. It is trying to get a strength in depth so a panel can deal with setbacks like that. No county can take serious hits. Even Tyrone being short of Seán Cavanagh last year. Was that the reason Cork beat them?”

Their semi-final experience against Kerry remains something of a conundrum. The four-point margin obscured the flatness of Meath’s game and contributed something, no doubt, to them being the only semi-finalists not to receive a single All Star award.

“We knew we were up against Kerry,” says O’Brien “And we didn’t perform. When you don’t perform it is disappointing. Maybe we weren’t allowed perform well. If you could figure out why we played without intensity well we would have the secret, we would have it figured out forever. Why do we not perform at different levels on different days? If we could solve that one we wouldn’t be worrying about dips in form.”

In big-picture terms Meath continue to progress. Some would argue this has been a season when as much has gone right for them as can go right for any team but teams can only play the hand they are dealt and the five goals against Dublin were executed with a panache and hunger which spoke well of their intent. The scramble against Louth. They put themselves in the position to get the break. Resilience as much as luck or human error created that moment.

So targets?

“I won’t use the word contract,” says O’Brien. “Whatever it is I have, it’s a one-year term. To me there is only one year, there is not next year. One match, the next one. Pundits will predict so and so is going to win but that is not the way it works in reality. It depends on people working on any given day. If they drop the performance and others up the performance favourites become losers.

“The way we approach every game, and this is the job, is getting fellas ready for whatever is facing them. If they don’t perform I have to take a good bit of the blame. I get some credit if they win so I can’t wash my hands of it. I think we win as a team, all of us, and we lose as a team, all of us.”

So they are back, emergent again as a force. Croke Park tomorrow and the expectant tribes of Kildare and Meath will mix alchemically creating that strange level of excitement unique to games between teams who are on the upswing. The money that considers itself to be smart has been saying Kildare will be putting an end to Meath’s run. That is to willingly factor out the notion of Meathness.

“I try to stay away from the hype,” says O’Brien. “If you get a win against Dublin you are a great team. If you perform like we did against Louth people swing down again. That happens within the supporters and among pundits generally. I try to focus on what we have to do. Look at what went wrong and change it. That’s all.”

Meath. The old familiar. No fuss. No fanfare. Same as it ever was.