Old rivalry but Dubs stronger than ever in new era
When the legendary teams managed by Seán Boylan were going about their business, they built an aura about themselves that endured for some time.
It is only in recent years that we are beginning to see the achievement of the Boylan era for what it was — an astonishing four titles won during a 12-year period before the sprawling Dublin metropolis ate into parts of the Royal County.
The Meath that invaded the capital back then before the Celtic Tiger were mostly great big unrepentant, unapologetic, unknowable and unremorseful men that ate the boys in blue for breakfast. Because of the legacy created by Lyons, Harnan, O’Malley, Hayes, McEntee, O’Rourke et al we still want to believe that Dublin versus Meath is still the quintessential clash of town vs country but deep down, we know the reality to be very different.
To paraphrase the Charlene one hit wonder, Never Been to Me (later parodied as Never Been to Meath by Dustin the Turkey), the Meath we think we know today is a “fantasy we create about people and places as we’d like them to be”.
A couple of months back, before a ball was kicked in Championship 2013, I spent some tenners on a few of those pre-championship provincial predictors that so many GAA clubs nowadays use a means of fundraising. I predicted that Kerry, Mayo and Donegal would win their respective provincial titles and out of mischief and respect, I chose Meath in Leinster — purely on the basis that they were the only team in the province that could muster up the chutzpah that would ensure they wouldn’t roll over and play dead when faced with Dublin.
That in itself is not enough anymore.
In Connacht, Galway would never have bended the knee to Mayo and likewise Limerick would’ve always fancied their chances of getting under Cork’s skin in Munster football but already this season we have seen how the realities of the modern game trample over all vestiges of tradition and over any misplaced sense of equality. Apart from London, only Wicklow and Cavan have managed to beat a team apparently above their station in this year’s championship. The day of David slaying Goliath appear long gone because Goliath just went and got himself a better defence, a better strategy, a bigger backroom team and he is unlikely to be taken out by one single, unsophisticated slingshot anymore.
I ticked the Meath box when it came to the Leinster Championship winners but even I don’t believe that. How could you? Where can you see Meath making hay tomorrow? Graham Reilly, their standout performer to date because of his lung-bursting runs that sometimes end up in scores, sometimes not, is going to come face to face tomorrow with someone who is just as quick, just as strong and probably will stay the course a bit longer. Whether it’s James McCarthy or Jack McCaffrey picking him up, Reilly is going to have to come up with even more than we’ve seen to date from him.
Damien Carroll has the mobility and the elusiveness to give Ger Brennan a bit of bother but the hope that Eamonn Wallace’s pace, Michael Newman’s ability from freesor Stephen Bray’s craft will trouble the Dublin rearguard is innocent at best.
Conor Gillespie and Brian Meade might relish a traditional battle for clean possession from kickouts but given the high tempo nature of Stephen Cluxton’s restarts for Dublin, it is likely Meath will be depending largely on their goalkeeper, Paddy O’Rourke for a break-even situation here. We saw in the league final how Tyrone won a huge percentage of Niall Morgan’s kick-outs launched right down the middle but the likes of Seamus Kenny, Mickey Burke, Padraic Harnan and Peadar Byrne are going to have to be diving on every breaking ball for Meath to get a foothold in the game.
Further back the field, Meath might expect to fare better against Dublin’s attack than either Westmeath or Kildare did up to now. In Donal Keogan, they have one of the very best tacklers in the game right now and Kevin Reilly generally does well on Bernard Brogan. Bryan Menton is more than capable of contributing to the cause too.
One of the things that struck me watching last Sunday’s Munster final is that Cork might have benefited from having an actual full-back-line that wanted to play as full-backs — that is two corner-backs and a traditional full-back. While we all know that the game isn’t played like that anymore, it can sometimes be an advantage having natural full-back-line players playing in their natural positions. Meath have those tomorrow and that must count for something.
Other things in Meath’s favour? The stability of the O’Dowd, Giles, Kelly and Brady combination on the sideline after the divisiveness of previous regimes, a better balance struck between smaller size and more mobility up front, more intelligent movement, better support play, better angles of running and most noticeably of all, better foot-passing in recent games.
The challenge for Meath tomorrow is that they’ve never been exposed to the type of game that Dublin play. How do you stop attackers working so well off each other, looping around the ball-carrier to create scoring chances? What do they have to do to stop a team who’ve scored 25 goals and 326 points in their 16 competitive games this year? An average scoring rate of 25 points a game is phenomenal and unless Meath find some way of slowing Dublin down, getting a hand in, standing them up when they shoot for goal and generally frustrating them, they could be in for a torrid afternoon.
The least Meath could do for all the neutrals is ask the questions of Dublin that haven’t been asked up to now. We still don’t know how Dublin’s defenders will react when asked to do more defending than attacking. Jack McCaffrey, for example, is one of the most exciting half-backs in the game today but only Mark Donnelly, Kieran Martin fleetingly and Eoghan O’Flaherty in the first minutes posed any questions of him defensively this year. How good is he? We suspect he is going to be one of the greats. Not because of his pace but because of his grace under pressure and because of how he times his runs to coincide with the second you least expect such explosiveness. It’s a rare gift and it has the capacity to light up the rest of the summer.
Tony McEntee asked us on these pages two weeks ago to consider what would happen when Dublin play a more defence-orientated team. How would they react when the space for first time ball disappeared? When runners can’t get the timing of their movement right? When they have to, by necessity, resort to slow build-up play? When McCaffrey, MacAuley, Flynn and all other Dublin attackers making off-the-shoulder runs will meet wall-after-wall of players? What then will Dublin do? It might not happen tomorrow but when it does, I believe they will find a way around it because, to borrow from another well-known tune, Dublin keeps on changing, and nothing seems the same.
These are rare old times indeed in Dublin GAA. I don’t expect a change tomorrow.
