Mayo, keep your eyes on Meath

THE Meath football team of 2009 are beginning to defy all handy categorisation. For a county whose rivers have run dry for a decade now, we would have thought getting to the last eight of the All-Ireland Championship would’ve sated the appetite and anything after that was for embellishment.

It certainly should be enough for your average team with three provincial champions and Kerry for company as we head for the last few hurdles of this year's football championship campaign. Meath, however, were not, are not and never will be your average team, and any notions that Mayo might have of the Royals being happy with their lot after a season of relative achievement will be quickly banished come 2pm tomorrow when Eamon O’Brien unleashes his men on John O Mahony’s charges.

The tradition of football in the Royal County has been one where kicking the ball is seen as the defining and fundamental core value in the game. Watching their game against Limerick last week it was notable that the old virtues may not hold sway to the same extent but the good old fashioned heart swelling ebullience so often associated with other Meath teams from the other recessionary era was still in evidence. Seeing Cormac McGuinness clean up on breaking ball, Peadar Byrne tracking runs out of the Limerick back-line as aggressively as he did, Chris O’Connor attack with such anarchic abandon and Stephen Bray bring his undoubted class to the table made all Meath supporters sense that the good days could be just around the corner again.