Restless Meehan out to make up for lost time

THERE hasn’t been too many times when Michael Meehan has felt all at sea, but last summer was one of those rare occasions.

Too much time on his hands, see? A man who thinks nothing of training with up to four teams in a single week and, there he was in mid-July, without a single game to occupy his thoughts.

After an earlier defeat to Mayo with the U21s, defeat to Tyrone in the All-Ireland qualifiers had prematurely released him from county duties for the season. The club had nothing to offer either. Caltra had already surrendered their Galway, Connacht and All-Ireland crowns with defeat to Corofin in the last eight of the county championships.

With cold turkey staring him in the face, Meehan decided it would be easier to face with a bit of distance. Canada, he decided, was distance enough.

“Personally, I wasn’t too happy with how the year went,” he recalled. “I didn’t feel I was doing myself justice on the pitch. I don’t know why that was but I would hope that I’d be able to do a bit more for the team this year and get a few more results.”

Results are exactly what Meehan’s presence seems to guarantee. Hogan Cup and All-Ireland U21 medals when he was still a minor in 2002 were the first indications of what was to come. A year later he added a Galway championship with Caltra and a Connacht senior championship with Galway, while the All-Ireland club - the pick of the bunch - was claimed on St Patrick’s Day of last year.

“I was talking about it recently with Tipperary’s Eoin Kelly and he was asking how it felt to win that one. It was just amazing. I’m sure we still don’t value it fully yet and we probably won’t for a few years yet.

“That’s what a lot of people have told me but when you catch yourself day dreaming about it now and again, you can’t help but smile. It was out of this world. It’ll be a hard one to top and I don’t know if anything will.”

Sure enough, after the summit, there’s the inevitable decline and, though last summer offered little, the mini-slide was arrested with his second U21 All-Ireland title last month.

“Just over twelve months ago we were preparing for a league final but Kerry beat us fairly well. We got a few goals at the end to make the scoreline look a bit better but even after that we felt that things were going fairly well.

“It just didn’t happen for us in the championship then. Mayo gave us a bit of a hockeying in the championship in Castlebar and, when I look back on it now, that set us back more than we thought at the time.”

After a league campaign that again wavered between the sublime and the ridiculous, the jury is still out on what impact they can make this year. Anything less than a convincing dispatching of Leitrim tomorrow will be seen as another further sign of weakness.

Not for the first time, the main question mark casting a shadow over Galway’s chances appears to be one of appetite rather than talent, not least the returned pair of Michael Donnellan and Padraic Joyce, who have been around the block more times than they would care to remember.

“Both Michael and Padraic took good breaks from the game and deservedly so. The very fact that they’re back shows they have the appetite for another year. They’re not going to come back for the hard training, busting a gut for nothing.

“People say they’ve won two All-Irelands already and that might make a guy lose the edge, but these guys are back for one reason and that’s to win a third All-Ireland. As a team, we can’t look that far forward though. Regaining the Connacht title from the lads across the border is the number one aim for now.”