Who saw Offaly coup coming?

By cautioning Dublin about Wexford, Westmeath's manager Brendan Lowry perhaps exaggerated to make his point but essentially he was right. So far in football, "it's been that type of championship" - that is a bookies' pension of a championship.

I could spend 10 lifetimes previewing last Sunday's Offaly-Meath match and still not come up with Offaly winning it. If matches were foreseeable purely in terms of logic, there'd be no need to play them but sometimes a result edges beyond the parameters of mere surprise to become something inexplicable. Sunday was one such occasion.

It was more surprising than Antrim's win over Down. Antrim mightn't have won a match in 18 years but there was a definite buzz that Down were vulnerable and only spineless equivocation prevented at least one previewer from looking really wise after the event. Even Wexford's surprising emergence from Leinster's preliminary group wasn't beyond the bounds of possibility. But what happened on Sunday looked as if it was.

This may seem unfair on an Offaly side which only two years ago were National League winners and a year before Leinster champions, but their relationship with Meath had been apparently defined in the last two championships. There was no particular need to adduce the contrasting records of the teams in the league where Meath operated at a higher level.

A further reason for viewing this match as a landmark upset is that it is the first time in 15 years that Meath have been beaten in a championship match without being able to fall back on plausible explanations. In the intervening years the county became a byword for championship indomitability.

Defining such a quality is difficult but the following more or less covers it: a team which never loses except to an obviously superior side and which occasionally beats superior sides.

Scrolling back through Meath's achievements in the Boylan years, it is possible to detect just such a quality at work in many championships. When defeat came it was at specific junctures. In 1989, after two successive All-Irelands, the team was wilting and had in the previous winter's league surrendered the three-year stranglehold they held over Dublin in all competitive matches.

If Dublin's win was a shock, it wasn't off the graph either. Three years later Meath were beaten by Laois. This was a sensation at the time but it was clearly seen as the end of the team. An era that was raised from the ashes of one defeat by Laois was seen - and this was contemporary, not worked out some time later - to have been symmetrically ended in identical circumstances.

Sean Boylan himself pointed out players in the dressing-room afterwards and frankly admitted that their best years were behind them although they weren't old men, and although many played on his assessment was proved correct.

Meath went down the tunnel of transition and its attendant trauma, culminating in the 10-point whacking from Dublin in 1995. This was the final straw and a major clearout followed. As of course did an All-Ireland.

In recent years, there is a strong case to be made for Meath having been unlucky not to have achieved a four-in-a-row of All-Irelands. No disrespect is intended to Kerry or Galway who did what all champions have to do - beat the teams which came up before them - but what was the probable reaction of Paidi O Se and John O'Mahony to Meath's defeats by Offaly and Kildare in the two years in question?

The 1997 Leinster final saw Meath hopelessly debilitated through injury and suspension. They were missing an entire fullback line and suffering from fatigue after taking three matches to dispose of Kildare. Few saw the Offaly win coming but it became clear early in the match that the weakening of the team had been too much for Meath to bear.

Offaly's exuberant attacking play might well have beaten a full-strength Meath but that's something no one can be sure of. A year later, Trevor Giles damaged his cruciate with 15 minutes left of the Leinster final against Kildare. Again, no one can dispute that Kildare showed great fortitude in winning the match at the death but would Meath's forwards have been so directionless had Giles remained on the pitch - and even without him they clawed back a threepoint deficit before being beaten at the death?

There is no contributory explanation for what happened on Sunday. Offaly were simply better. Meath were missing players but so were Offaly and the outsiders' losses looked more grievous. Graham Geraghty had received good notices in the two previous defeats of Offaly and his absence was undoubtedly a blow. But Sunday's match was tight and edgy and the opposition marked like demons: not circumstances in which Geraghty has traditionally thrived.

Yet it was the manner of the victory which was really extraordinary. Offaly imposed a claustrophobic game on Meath and defused their most important player Trevor Giles. The match was level going into the last 10 minutes, usually the template for a Meath success. Instead Offaly tightened the stranglehold, held their nerve and kicked the decisive scores.

What inklings had there been of such an outcome? None. Offaly's graph was in decline, they were missing important players and had a young and inexperienced manager. In their favour was the memory of having won Leinster only three years ago but that had been superseded by what happened in the following two years.

Maybe in the end, Meath were complacent. Their wins over Offaly had carefully prescribed contexts: in 1998, revenge for the previous year's high-profile defeat and last year caution about an Offaly backlash particularly as they had dethroned Kildare, the reigning provincial champions.

Sunday must have been a harder match to deal with in motivational terms and that much showed. Offaly were the ones with the single focus and eight months to stoke the embers of their resentment.

In the end, maybe there is no rationalising upsets in sport. History may teach us that we learn nothing from history or as Gil Scott-Heron cautioned in his classic The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.

"The revolution will be no re-run brothers;

The revolution will be live."