Christy O'Connor Talking Points: The odd and the familiar in wide open battle field
BATTLE: Kerry's David Clifford battles with Dublin's David Byrne during their Division 1 match. Pic: Stephen McCarthy/Sportsfile
Thirty years ago, Meath began their 1996 Leinster championship in a manner that would be inconceivable now.
Meath had finished second in Division One, on the same number of points as Donegal, who had topped the group.
And yet, Carlow, who had finished mid-table in Division Four that spring, were silently fancied to turn Meath over in a Leinster semi-final.
Why? Meath had been hammered in the 1995 provincial final by Dublin and that team had effectively broken up by 1996.
Some of Meath’s most decorated warriors - Brian Stafford, Colm O’Rourke, Robbie O’Malley and PJ Gillic – had retired, while Seán Boylan named a stack of debutantes as he went about rebuilding the team.
Six of the players which featured on the day were still U21 as Meath were deemed vulnerable to a hardened Carlow team that had hammered Wexford and overcome a sticky Wicklow side.
The mood in Carlow was giddy with excitement as they chased a third consecutive championship win for the first time since 1944. But Meath blew any notions out of their heads with a dominant 18-point victory.
It still didn’t alter Meath’s status as rank outsiders for an All-Ireland but they made a mockery of those odds by taking out All-Ireland champions, Dublin in the Leinster final, before going on to win that 1996 All-Ireland against all expectations.
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Nobody saw it coming but even fewer saw Mayo going so close either, only losing the All-Ireland final to Meath by one point after a tumultuous and controversial replay.
Mayo went into that 1996 championship with even less expectancy around their hopes. Hammered in the 1995 Connacht final, Mayo had also lost the 1994 final to Leitrim.
They’d spent the winter-spring of 1995-’96 in Division Three as John Maughan also went about rebuilding the team with young talent. After only stumbling past London in the Connacht quarter-final, everybody thought Mayo were going nowhere. And then they edged past Roscommon and Galway in Connacht before taking out Kerry in the All-Ireland semi-final.
By All-Ireland semi-final weekend that year in 1996, every team was eyeing a golden opportunity. As well as Meath and Mayo, Kerry had come with a new and young team to finally break Cork’s grip on the province and win a first Munster title in five years. Kerry were chasing a first All-Ireland in ten years while Tyrone – who had become the first team to win successive Ulster titles in over two decades – were fancied to win a first All-Ireland. And then Meath turned them over in an awesome display.
At face value, there is a world of difference between the 1996 All-Ireland semi-finals and this weekend’s pairings, particularly with Dublin and Kerry involved. And in so many other ways, there isn’t. Similar to 1996, few would have predicted three of this weekend’s four semi-finalists at the outset of the championship.
There has been other seasons across the last three decades when a number of teams that reached the All-Ireland semi-finals would have been considered wildcard possibilities at the outset of those championships – 1998, 2004, 2010 and 2020.
Galway-Kildare was a novel final in 1998 but Kildare beat then All-Ireland champions, Kerry, in the semi-final, while Galway – who like Kildare had shown flashes of their potential in 1997 when losing an epic in Connacht to Mayo - took out a Derry team that were considered serial All-Ireland contenders throughout that decade. Derry just couldn’t get out of Ulster at that time.
The 2010 semi-final pairings of Down-Kildare and Cork-Dublin were also unusual but that was mostly centred around Down-Kildare.
Cork had been in two of the three previous finals while despite rebuilding, Dublin were still loaded with experienced players from the side that narrowly lost All-Ireland semi-finals in 2006 and 2007.
Tipperary and Cavan’s famine-ending provincial campaigns in 2020 added even more novelty to a strangely unique championship but they still faced off with Dublin and Mayo squads routinely used to that stage.
The only outlier All-Ireland semi-final pairings across the last three decades was 2004, when Kerry faced Derry and Mayo met Fermanagh.
Earlier in that campaign in Ulster, Tyrone hammered Derry before then beating Fermanagh, but both sides recalibrated the model and drove themselves into the last four.
It was Fermanagh’s first time on that stage, where they lost a replay to a Mayo side that won a first Connacht championship that summer in five years. Ultimately though, Kerry went on to convincingly win that 2004 All-Ireland.
Kerry are favourites to do so again now. A Jack O’Connor side once more appears to be the standout team, but there are vast differences from 22 years ago where a more open championship combined with new rules have equalised the footballing world to make ultimate glory seem a lot more feasible.
Nobody would have imagined these All-Ireland final pairings midway through this championship; Mayo were dismantled by Roscommon; Louth were whipped by Dublin; a Dublin side rebuilding and rebooting under Ger Brennan subsequently went down to Westmeath before being beaten by Louth.
Dublin, Louth and Mayo were lodged deep in the trenches, penned in from a barrage of heavy artillery but they consistently worked their way through the trenches.
Kerry are still the strongest army in this war, but now that so many of the other big guns have been decommissioned and deactivated, Dublin, Louth and Mayo will feel that they can achieve the ultimate glory on this battle-field.
In the aftermath of the 2023 All-Ireland final, the outburst of emotion from the Dublin players outlined just how much that victory meant.
Having lost the 2022 All-Ireland semi-final to Kerry by one point, and the 2021 semi-final to Mayo after extra-time, that 2023 victory against Kerry was the sweetest All-Ireland Dublin bagged during their glorious era of dominance.
“The most special All-Ireland I’ve ever won,” said James McCarthy after winning his ninth Celtic Cross. “To come back after being knocked down twice and a few people ruling you out and thinking the time has passed … but I knew we were still good enough to win it. I had no doubt in my mind.”
Dublin didn’t when it was Kerry in the other corner – because they had become so used to beating them. Dublin completely changed the mindset and the dynamic of their relationship with Kerry through their dominance. “I think we're a bit in their (Kerry’s) heads," said Mickey Whelan, former Dublin player, manager and coach, in November 2018.
Were they? Dublin had to be in Kerry’s heads, but in the sense that they had to focus so much on beating them to try and win an All-Ireland. Dublin had the best players and the best team but beating Kerry again in a fifth successive championship match in the 2019 All-Ireland, which secured the 5-in-a-row immortality Kerry’s greatest team couldn’t achieve, was all the harder again to stomach when Kerry wondered if the point Whelan had raised was true. Were Kerry spooked by Dublin?
Kerry finally staunched the bleeding in 2022 but then Dublin cut them open again a year later. The sides haven’t met in the championship since but Dublin and Kerry are in different places now; Kerry are All-Ireland champions and favourites to retain their title, while Dublin have nowhere near the status or aura they carried into previous games against Kerry.
And yet, Dublin will be drawing on that capacity where they still feel they can get inside Kerry’s heads. Ger Brennan began the mind-games during the week when stating how all the pressure was on Kerry.
There is always pressure on Kerry but this is a game they feel they really have to win - especially when recent history is taken into consideration.
Yet Dublin have been in this position plenty of times before. And some of these Dublin players know exactly how to weaponise that mentality in these matches against Kerry.
Five days after Louth’s incredible Leinster senior success last May, that wave of momentum surged even higher around the county as Louth reached a first All-Ireland U20 final, defeating Mayo in the semi-final by one point.
Fourteen months on and a host of those players will meet again on a totally different stage on Saturday. Eight of the Mayo players who played that evening are part of the current panel – Darragh Beirne, Hugh O’Louglin, John MacMonagle, Diarmuid Duffy, Seamus Howard, Colm Lynch, Tom Lydon and Eoin McGreal. Beirne and McGreal played against Cork two weeks ago while Duffy and MacMonagle were listed on the squad of 26.
In total, Louth have 11 players on the current squad who featured in that U20 semi-final; James Maguire, Seán Callaghan, Tadgh McDonnell, Padraic Tinnelly, Tiernan Markey Pierce Grimes-Murphy, Shane Lennon, Cormac McKeon, Adam Gillespie, Conor MacCríosta and Darragh Dorrian.
Callaghan, James Maguire and McDonnell featured two weeks ago against Monaghan while Markey, MacCríosta and Tinnelly were on the bench.
Six of those young Louth and Mayo players made the 2025 All-Ireland U20 Team-of-the-Year; Beirne, O’Loughlin, Maguire, Callaghan, McDonnell and Tinnelly.
Fourteen months on from that U20 meeting, 19 of the players that played that evening are part of the current senior squads, which is a phenomenal return. And yet, the most talented player from those two groups – Kobe McDonald – didn’t feature in that U20 match 14 months ago.
Still only 17 at the time (as he didn’t turn 18 until last December), McDonald wasn’t involved with the 2025 U20s. But he gets to share a stage with some of those players now on a far bigger setting.
