Cool hand Luke eyes another miracle

When Luke Dempsey thinks back to the crazy few weeks he was in the running for the Meath job it makes him smile.

But for a by now infamous Meath County Board u-turn, it would have been him, not Seamus ‘Banty’ McEnaney, named as the first outside manager in the county’s history.

Instead of managing the seven-time All-Ireland kingpins, he took charge of a county he spent his teenage years living and whose claim to fame was a Leinster title in 1944.

Last year he helped Carlow to their most successful football championship run since 1958. Reaching a Leinster semi-final may not seem like much to most counties but, having learned to love the game during his school days in Carlow CBS, Luke knew what it meant more than most observers.

It was a small miracle when you examine the obstacles in his path during his four-year reign and when he looks at the way every manager in Meath has been treated since then, he is glad fate took him in a different direction.

“A lot of stuff went on behind the scenes because a lot of former county players and delegates did not want me at the time. I had never gone looking for the job so when I heard that I ran a mile,” he said.

“They appointed Eamonn O’Brien, who had done a great job alongside Sean Boylan, and then they gave him the bullet. It was most unfair. There was no more truer Meath man around and he did a great job with them.

“Ironically they put a group together from Monaghan, Armagh and Tyrone which showed they weren’t as xenophobic as I thought they were. But this year it resurfaced again which shows there’s still a lot of politics going on there.

“I’m quite sure Seamus McEnaney leads a happy camp and I haven’t heard the players giving off about him. He’s a good personable guy. All that stuff is driven for political reasons and serves no purpose.”

Well, almost no purpose. Having watched Meath trounce Wicklow he saw a team playing for their manager showing all the traditional strengths of Royal county football. Following the latest round of Meath boardroom shenanigans, Dempsey knows they have found a cause to rally behind.

Add to that the little historical fact that Carlow have only beaten one of Leinster’s traditional top four of Meath, Offaly, Kildare and Dublin (Offaly in 2005) since 1944 and you can understand why they are 15/2 underdogs. But Luke has always been an optimist having brought Westmeath and Longford from obscurity to respectability.

“We’ve been training well and, just like last year when we beat Louth, we’ve worked hard in the five weeks between the end of the league and the championship,” he said.

“We know it will be a difficult game but all we can hope for is that they put all the work we have done with them into practice.”

Some might accuse him of living in a dream world but he’s had his eyes opened to the plight of a genuine minnow since taking the Carlow job in 2009. Most of that first year was spent trying to get players to turn up for training and buy into modern inter-county demands.

By the time they reached the qualifiers, a daunting away trip to meet Donegal in Ballybofey, he had just 18 players to make up his panel. At least now that number has risen to 26 and it would have been more but for the curses of emigration and cruciates.

“When you reach championship every county will have lost players with injury and you play the hand you are dealt with but you can’t afford that when you have tight resources.”

And those resources are stretched when you factor in the loss of John Murphy, Paul Cashin and Cormac Mullins with cruciate knee injuries, Pat Hickey to recurring hip problems and Tom Walsh (Boston) and Ed Finnegan (London) to emigration.

But Luke has seen the best of his Carlow sides when their backs are to the wall. They should have beaten Antrim in Casement Park last year, shook Derry for 50 minutes in 2010 and were level with Donegal at half time in 2009.

Maybe, he has one more miracle up his sleeve.