Royals must show clinical, if not cynical, edge

When Meath shimmied in from the verges of obscurity and irrelevance with their win over Kildare a few weeks back there was something in their game that felt different.

Quite apart from the fact they had managed to ambush theirbogey team of the last two or three seasons, the most startling fact was that this was a Meath team with pace.

Any time Meath have come up short in recent seasons the second halves of all their games have tended to offer an unforgiving diagnostic in terms of pace and intensity. While Meath’s willingness to allow the ball do the work in the good old-fashioned sense was always admirable, it usually ended up with them looking ragged and disjointed in the last 10 minutes.