Today’s history is all that matters
“The only history worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today,” he said.
This weekend, while the supporters of Kerry and Meath may pass the hours before throw-in poring over newspaper colour-pieces reminiscing about the Royal stuffing administered to the Kingdom at this stage of the championship in 2001, you can be sure that Jack O’Connor and Eamon O’Brien will be more inclined to take Mr Ford’s more jaundiced view of history.
They will be focused on coming out on the right side of Monday morning’s dispatches from Croke Park.
So when it comes to tomorrow’s battle to join Cork in this year’s All-Ireland Final, 2001 is ‘bunk’. Kerry will be wary, not because of what happened in 2001, but because this is an unpredictable Meath team that seems to be heading in the right direction.
Likewise, Meath’s pre-match preparations won’t feature much bluster about ‘remembering’ 2001. They will believe they have a chance, partly because of the incremental improvements they have made since being dumped out of Leinster, but mostly because Kerry have been blowing hot but invariably cold all summer.
Meath are less likely, however, to accept entirely Mr Ford’s history-as-bunk theory.
In recent games, Meath have been showing some of the traditional virtues associated with their county’s footballers. There was a familiar steel, fearlessness and sense of abandon about the manner in which they first persevered and then kicked for home against Mayo. And Meath are one of the few counties where the idea of a ‘tradition’ means more than a mix of folk-memory and trite generalisations.
For those who dabble in the inexact science of predicting the outcome of championship football, the question of the importance of tradition in the GAA has been an interesting subplot to the summer.
Before the Kerry-Dublin quarter-final the majority of the punditocracy stuck a little too slavishly to the form-lines, while most of those who bucked the conventional wisdom and went for a Kerry win based their judgement on Kerry’s ‘tradition’ against Dublin.
In the end, Kerry’s devastating performance proved conclusively that form-lines can be misread spectacularly in a competition in which teams don’t face each other that regularly, but even the most inflexible believer in the peculiar aura of the green-and-gold would struggle to attribute Kerry’s 17-point winning margin to ‘tradition’. Croke Park might be worth a handful of scores to Kerry but no more than that.
This time out the tables have been turned, and the form-book suggests a Kerry victory, while the case for a Meath upset rests largely on a variety of theories regarding their enduring tradition. In reality, Meath have not given any indication that they are capable of producing a performance in the same solar system as that delivered by Kerry in the quarter-final. The problem for Kerry is that they have given several performances this summer that were a solar system away from what they produced against Dublin.
Last week Eamon O’Brien paid eloquent tribute to Kerry’s virtuoso display in the last round and suggested that if they come close to scaling similar heights Meath will be beaten handsomely. It sounded like an honest assessment rather than the insincere foreplay inter-county managers usually indulge in before combat. Either way O’Brien has a point.
Given Meath’s slow start to their quarter-final win a few weeks back, and Kerry’s speed out of the blocks against Dublin, it is crucial to Royals’s short term wellbeing that they compete aggressively in the opening exchanges and create the conditions for the “huge battle” Jack O’Connor expects it to be. Colm Brady’s training will have Meath prepared for Kerry’s early onslaught and after that it will be up to Kerry players to adapt as effectively and intelligently to the unfolding drama as Cork players did last week.
Eamon O’Brien, Robbie O’Malley and Donal Curtis have enough Croke Park experience behind them to plot a way through the opening half and, like any underdog, their team will hope to be within touching distance as the game heads for its conclusion. The danger from a Meath perspective is that the ritual talking down of their chances this week could become self-fulfilling prophecy. Then again, the Meath psyche doesn’t have the capacity nor the pretension for bigging themselves up so the low-key approach is probably best. I suppose we’ll just have to take the pre-match talk down as we find it and accept the mischief underpinning it for what it is.
The reality however, is that one of Meath’s major motivations going into tomorrow’s match is to atone for their ineptitude against Cork at this stage two years ago when they really should have done better after a summer of staggering progress. Many of tomorrow’s side were on duty that day and they will be keen to avoid the fall out and the regrets from a semi-final hosing. Meath backs and midfield have the durability, the stubbornness and the bloody-mindedness to create the conditions for a dogfight. Their wing forwards Peadar Byrne and Stephen Bray give scores as well as graft and as Tommy Griffin said on these pages a few days ago “do you ever see their inside forwards with the hands out, moaning about the quality of the ball into them? They fight for everything.”
Meath’s outfield players have been getting away with coughing up possession on their long ball into the forwards up to now partly because of the honest tackling from all six forwards but mainly because teams like Mayo, Roscommon and Limerick either don’t have the conviction, the speed or the nerve to tidy up and counter attack at pace. This is the one key area I expect Kerry to profit from. After the Dublin game Tomás O Sé, Mike McCarthy, Killian Young and even Tom O’Sullivan will not and must not now be content to just win their ball and lay it off. They will go for the kill if there is a whiff of reticence in tracking back and while Meath may well put shackles on two, three or even four of the six Kerry forwards, it would require a serious off-day on Colm Cooper’s or Declan O’Sullivan’s part not to make some impression on the scoreboard.
At this stage of the championship, winning is just a means to an end, an opportunity to improve and iron out the wrinkles. The buildup must be gradual and preferably without exclamation marks or extravagance. Following Tyrone’s exit Kerry look to be the best schooled team in the country at timing their run to perfection in August, availing of the escape hatch in early summer if needs be. While it is difficult to see them putting on another extravaganza against Meath, it is equally difficult to imagine them retreating into the slump that saw them staggering punch-drunk through Munster and the qualifiers. Meath will certainly play as their proud tradition demands of them, but Kerry look far better equipped to make ‘today’s history’ and prove that all the rest really is more or less bunk.
