Should we pine for the mayhem and madness of Dublin and Meath's Royal rumbles?

Paul Keane crunches the numbers on how football has changed since the glory days of the Meath-Dublin rivalry

Sat, 17 Jul, 2021 - 07:00

Paul Keane

TG4, as Sean Boylan puts it, has made liars out of us all.

Content for years with sepia-tinted memories of how proper football used to be played, we got a rude awakening when TG4 started broadcasting re-runs of all those old classics.

Turns out the quality wasn’t always so hectic. So was football more exciting 30 years ago than now? Perhaps. But a better quality product? Not a chance.

With Dublin playing Meath tomorrow at Croke Park, what better way to illustrate the point than to compare the Dublin team of 30 years ago, during the 1991 four-in-a-row with Meath, and the current one.

Truth be told, this was a lockdown project, a couple of lost nights spent pausing and rewinding the fourth game of that epic series of matches in 1991 and contrasting it with how Dublin went about winning last December’s All-Ireland final. Dublin then versus Dublin now. Or, in reality, Gaelic football then versus Gaelic football now.

The standout figure is that in that fourth game against Meath 30 years ago, Dublin made just 34 handpasses in the entire 70-plus minutes; 32 completed and two incompleted.

Against Mayo in last December’s All-Ireland final, Dublin handpassed the ball 221 times. Even more incredible than that dramatic increase is that Dublin only failed to find the target with three of their 221 handpasses, underlining how possession-based football games are now won and lost.

Here’s another clinker. How many times do you think Dublin hoofed the ball upfield to nobody in particular in that ‘91 encounter? A remarkable 13 times. Only four times did they actually manage to retain possession. And how many times do you think Dessie Farrell’s crew cleared the ball away so crudely last December? None, of course.

That’s where the excitement was in the past, the aerial battle, the 50-50 tussle for possession. But as a strategy for retaining possession, it stunk.

Interestingly, Dublin actually kick-passed the ball considerably more in last year’s All-Ireland final than they did in the fourth encounter of ‘91, just 41 times in ‘91 compared to 66 kicks last winter.

That’s partly down to the string of kick passes completed by Dublin deep in their own half as they ran down the clock late in the final win over Mayo. It’s also down to how stop-start that ‘91 game was, with 44 frees awarded by Tommy Howard and some thundering hits dispensed — an early ‘challenge’ left Colm O’Rourke concussed, Mick Galvin was almost decapitated by a Colm Coyle elbow — preventing much in the way of free-flowing football.

Of course, the attractive passing move that led to Kevin Foley’s game-breaking goal for Meath, and David Beggy’s subsequent winning point, are what stick in the memory.

Asked which is the superior product, what we watched at Croke Park in 1991 or what we’ll watch there tomorrow, former Meath manager Boylan couldn’t answer.

“You can’t really say, the game is very different,” said Boylan, who took Meath to their fourth All-Ireland final in five seasons after beating Dublin in ‘91. “In a strange sort of way, it’s a bit like chess now. You create space and then you can go for the jugular.”

Boylan, speaking as an ambassador for Bord Gais Energy’s GAA Legends Tour series, has kept up with the evolution of the game. He’s currently part of the Down U-20 management so isn’t about to harp on about how good the game used to be.

“Don’t tell me that everything that was there years ago was perfect because it wasn’t,” said the four-time All-Ireland winning manager. “TG4 have made a liar out of a lot of us. We thought we were great because we hadn’t the cameras to show it!”

Yet he does pine for the mayhem and the madness, the uncertainty, and if Meath are to score another landmark win over Dublin tomorrow, they may have to conjure a little of that again.

“Maybe it was more frantic years ago. I love the fact that in the game as it was, you seemed to trust your fellow player more. In other words, if you put the ball up to the forwards, you could trust them to win it. At that time, people would say that if you put 10 balls in and the back doesn’t win seven of them, then he shouldn’t be on the field!

“The excitement was great, even with the mistakes... because that’s what happens with competition when the mind gets tired and the body gets tired. People make mistakes they wouldn’t normally make and somebody else comes out and does something extraordinary, like Kevin Foley scoring the goal.

“The previous week, we were in Scotland and for 40 minutes on the Sunday over there we practised nothing else but our movement up and down the field like that. Had I any idea that this was going to come into play the following Sunday against Dublin? To be quite honest with you, I hadn’t. It was an extraordinary time.”

Then and now

How Dublin went about their business in 1991 versus now:

1991 v Meath, Leinster SFC third replay

Dublin handpasses: 34 (Completed 32)

Dublin kick passes: 41 (Competed 21)

Long aimless clearances: 13

Long kick-outs: 13

Short kick-outs: 4

2020 v Mayo, All-Ireland SFC final

Dublin handpasses: 221 (Completed 218)

Kick passes: 66 (Completed 62) (Attempted kick passes: 4)

Long aimless clearances: 0