The light plane flying high over Croke Park on All Ireland Sunday towed behind it a simple message: ‘No Incineration’ and we thought it was a plea to Meath not to repeat their semi-final immolation of Kerry’s championship aspirations, writes An Fear Rua …

We were wrong! The team whose goose was well and truly incinerated – and long before the end of the final – belonged, in fact, to the ‘Boys in Green’. Trussed up, stuffed and well and truly cooked by a superior Galway side that patiently and clinically took them apart and over ran them in the end.

But, this is an amateur game and the players and mentors of a fine team are entitled to our respect and to dignity in defeat. This has been a great championship run by the Royal county. They have given their own, and the followers of other counties, much to savour along the way by way of good football, exciting games and a ‘never-say-defeated’ attitude. However, perhaps with the benefit of hindsight, we can now see more clearly that that some fundamental stress points in the line-out were being ingeniously pasted over by concoctions from the Old Master Chef Himself, the wily Seán Boylan. Basically, he skilfully mixed certain ingredients that might otherwise have provided us with plain soda bread and managed to sustain a soufflé of Summer ambition and achievement. But, even the best of soufflés are largely made up of air and, in the end, just collapse to nothingness in the eating. Whatever about the deserved Galway celebrations, another team in Maroon-and-White – Luke Dempsey’s Westmeath – must be rueing all those chances they had to put Meath away, even in that very first encounter of this year’s championship - let alone in the later games.

In more reflective moments after the game, it is now possible to discern some reasons why ‘Galway did unto Meath as Meath hath done unto Kerry firstly’(An Fear Rua 3:27). Despite some good block downs by John McDermott, Meath consistently ‘lost it’ in midfield and the half forwards. This meant that, for long stretches of the first half, play was mostly in the Meath ‘third’ of the field and Ollie Murphy, Ray Magee and Geraghty were meagrely starved of scoring chances. Even so, Kilmainhamwood’s Magee caught the eye with his cool point scoring. In the first half especially, when concentration was most needed, Meath gave away possession much too easily and their much-vaunted full-back line looked uncertain. At one stage, Donal Curtis, from half-back, had to scramble the ball away from the goal line for a ‘forty five’ as his colleagues looked on helplessly.

On balance, in the first half, the remarkable Darren Fay got slightly the better of his pivotal mano a mano duel with Padraig Joyce but only flattered to deceive, and Joyce himself added to the illusion by frittering away some scoreable chances. But, in the second half, Joyce effortlessly pulled away from him to become ‘Man of the Match’ in AFR’s view. So, that half-time score of six points each was actually Meath’s finest achievement on the day, but it was far from sufficient to win.

Other Meath players were well below their normal ‘par’ – the incomparable Evan Kelly, Richie Kealy and Graham Geraghty, for example. Their captain, Trevor Giles, it has to be said, had something of a nightmare of a game… one of those days when nothing went right for him. In the pre-match parade, AFR was more than a little concerned to see the Skryne man glancing all around him rather casually, and looking up and down into the stands. AFR has seen this ‘look’ too many times in Croker from the likes of Leitrim, Mayo and Roscommon when they finally get to Croke Park, before being beaten there. It’s the kind of approach that says’ ‘Sure, I may as well enjoy the day out in Croker …savour the atmosphere … Sure, I mightn’t be back again’. Whether all this was the result of a collective Royal over-confidence following the manner of the defeat of Kerry, or what, we will never know. One thing is clear, however, at the end of this year’s championship – you need to string to together five or six solid results to win the football All Ireland now, rather than executing a ‘spectacular’ in the semi-final.

Apart from Meath’s All Ireland hopes, a number of football myths were slaughtered in Croke Park also, as in:
Myth Number 1: ‘Meath selectors are always shrewd and quick to react …’,
Myth Number 2: ‘Fourteen men will often beat fifteen in a big game …’ and
Myth Number 3: ‘Meath never give up trying …’

Myth Number 1:‘Meath selectors are always shrewd and quick to react …’
In fact, the Meath mentors were too slow and too unsure in their response to situations where their players were clearly not ‘hacking it’ against their Galway opponent and they seemed to lack confidence in their ‘bench’. Their shrewdest substitution came fifteen minutes from the end, sparked a deceptive revival, but came too late to affect the overall result. This was when Dunshaughlin’s Niall Kelly came on in the number twenty jersey. Within seconds, Kelly spotted a chance, grabbed the ball from a dithering Paddy Reynolds to quickly take a free: a long, raking, accurate punt over the Galway half-back line, cleverly knocked on by Geraghty to McDermott, who won a penalty. The apparently insouciant Giles stepped up to take it, promptly smacked it six inches wide of the left hand post, Galway swept to the other end from the kick-out and got a point. From a chance of going to only two points down, and staging one of their traditional barnstorming revivals, Meath were rocked back to a six point deficit. Kelly continued to supply some more long, accurate kicks in the Galway full-back line that made them look distinctly shaky. Meath fans began to wonder what ‘might have been’ if Ollie Murphy had been under some of those high, dropping balls in the first half.

Myth Number 2:‘Fourteen men will often beat fifteen in a big game …’
This might hold true against less experienced sides like Westmeath, but Nigel Nestor’s sending-off was a portent that Meath were in big trouble. Unlike other teams, and fair play to their manager John O’Mahony for it, Galway used their extra man intelligently, so the numerical imbalance in their favour became an asset rather than a liability.

Myth Number 3:‘Meath never give up trying …’
Inter-county Gaelic football is not easy. ‘If it were that aisy, we’d all be playing it’, as one of the Gowlnacalley-John Redmonds’ boyos remarked recently in the back ‘shnug’ of Ma Molloy’s Famous Drinking Emporium. However, it has to be said – and we’ll name no names – a number of Meath’s more famous ‘bigger guns’ uncharacteristically ‘dropped the head’ after the Giles penalty miss… and with that went any chance of beating Galway on the day as well as one of Meath’s great psychological trump cards for the future.

What of Galway? An Fear Rua is always glad to see a Galway football team take an All Ireland. They are a great people and the lyrical sounds of Gaeilge Chonamara on the air waves as we drove home from Croker were a pleasure to listen to. As a whole, their Back division never gave Meath a chance to get started, with Gary Fahey playing a real captain’s role at full-back and the half-back line of Meehan, Mannion and De Paor being particularly outstanding. After a shaky start, when he kicked wide a few times from normally scoreable positions, Michael Donnellan played well at mid-field, but in this sector of the field – as we suspected before hand – Kevin Walsh had his most brilliant game yet in the Maroon-and-White. Padraig Joyce, we have praised already, and with a leader on song as he was, he gave strength to the talent around him – Fallon, Savage and brother Tommy. On the side line, of course, one of the shrewdest of them all … Jo