Ward feels victory over Louth is crucial

FOOTBALL LEAGUE DIVISION TWO:IF MEATH lose to Louth on Sunday they will probably be relegated from Division Two. However, Mark Ward disagrees with the suggestion that the Royal County are of a third-tier standard.

“No, I’d like to think we’re not, but some of the performances we’ve put in over the last two or three years in the league have been so bad and I think any league form, whether it be soccer, rugby, Gaelic, it’s all about consistency.

“Obviously the championship is the big thing but if we’re to do well or get up to Division One of the league, we need to get the consistency . . . That will feed through to the championship. If we could only just get that right.”

Ward sifted through what has gone wrong this year. They beat Monaghan and Westmeath to get the campaign motoring. Two games in Navan followed when they made a mess of putting Kildare away and got sussed by Derry. Galway won by a single score before Tyrone handed over a 10-point beating.

Four defeats will always be seen as a crisis in Meath. The natives, just like last year, blamed their Monaghan-born manager, Séamus McEnaney.

Imagine the bile that will rain down from the Páirc Tailteann gallery if Louth send them packing.

“The situation we are in now the players really need to stand up and drive it on and make sure we win this game. We couldn’t ask for anything more from the management set-up and it’s really down to the players in this last match.”

These players can no longer include Joe Sheridan in their ranks. The big full forward is playing ball in Boston nowadays with Wolfe Tones GAA club.

The first really high-profile Gaelic footballer forced to emigrate due to unemployment.

“Yeah, it was a big shock,” said Ward of his friend’s departure. “I’d be close enough to Joe myself so I knew the situation he was in and he was finding it tough and trying to play his best football. It was something he had to do and the whole panel understood where he was coming from and everybody supports him in his decision.

“He is a leader and one of our senior players as well so it was a massive blow. It’s something that Joe didn’t want to do and I think he looked at every option to make sure he could stay on and play football. His family would be quite close here so I’d say the decision to leave would have been a very difficult one for him. It’s a pity it turned out that way.

“Hopefully he won’t be gone for too long but I suppose it’ll just depend on work.”

Any chance of seeing Sheridan return for the championship? “He hasn’t mentioned anything like that. I know he’s playing with the Wolfe Tones club over there. He’s well set up with work. He’s delighted that he did make the change because of the way things were going for him here. Unless things pick up here, unfortunately, he probably won’t be back.”

The real worry for an inter-county panel is the next wave of players coming out of third-level education. “At the moment we’ve a good lot of students in the panel. In the next two or three years if these boys coming out of college can’t get jobs, it’s going to be a serious threat.”

There is a more pressing concern, even a paranoia, that McEnaney is changing the traditional way Meath play football.

Ward doesn’t buy into this simply because the game itself has changed. “People talk about our traditional style of Meath football and stuff like that but we did play that last year in the Leinster championship. We may have overdone that at times and it didn’t work for us. Coming into the qualifiers we tried to change it a small bit. In this year’s league we have nearly gone the other way. I think the players have overdone some of the changes. We just need to mix it up a little bit.

“We obviously don’t want to abandon our traditional style of football but with the way the game has gone and when you are playing different oppositions sometimes one style of football isn’t going to work so you have to mix it up.

“It’s trying to get that nice balance between the traditional style and playing it through the hands. That’s what we are trying to do at the moment, and adapting as the game goes on. I don’t think Séamus or the management team are trying to steer us away from a Meath-style of traditional football at all.

“He’s just trying to bring more versatility into it. For us, it’s just getting used to that so we definitely don’t want to stray from that too much, but we have to be able to adapt.”