McEntee is on course to make inroads with Meath

IT’S a first championship season as manager for Andy McEntee and anyone who knows the man who was part of the set-up during the glory days of the late 1980s, well he will want to leave his mark.

If the enthusiasm and spirit he generates can be transferred to the players then there is little doubt Meath will make enormous strides during his managerial reign.

Despite his relatively short time in the role McEntee (pictured) has already experienced plenty of the ups and downs of intercounty football during this year’s O’Byrne Cup and division two league campaign. That included a defeat to Sunday’s opponents.

‘That was one of a few shocks to the system, to tell you the truth,’ McEntee said at the recent press morning in Dowth House, home of the sponsor Eoinn Brennan.

‘You look at thathat game and you look at the Kildare game in the first round of the League andd you’re going, ‘Jesus, what’s going on here’. Then you look at the game againstt Down learn and, a little ultimately, tiobebit you probably more from days like that than you do fromm when you per-performed well but, sure, we found ourselves in a situation against Louth in Navan where they worked harder than us. They outfought us. They bullied us and fellas had to accept that.

‘There is always the difficulty when you train well and you prepare well. Then you go out onto the pitch and you think it’s automatically going to happen and that’s where I think we found ourselves on a couple of occasions.

‘Every game is different and you have to make it happen.

‘If you put yourself in the players’ shoes and you’ve done all this work and made all the sacrifices, why would you give that up and not play on the day?

‘When it comes down to it, it’s all about the game. It’s not about the training, it’s about the game, so fellas have to realise that connection themselves, ‘I’m doing all this work so that I can play on the day’, and they have to answer to themselves if they don’t play on the day.’

Despite all the preparation that goes into training and the sacrifices players make and the pressure they are under to perform, McEntee doesn’t believe that the enjoyment is gone out of the game.

‘You’ve got 40 young fellas training and playing and living and eating and acting the goat together. Of course there’s fun involved in that. And of course there’s serious parts to it and there’s down sides of it. There are 40 players and there’s only 15 of them can get picked. That’s tough on the other guys.

‘But there is a really good spirit among the group. I think they’re enjoying it and if you’re interested enough in sport, why wouldn’t you enjoy it?’

McEntee was an interested spectator when Louth just managed to see off Wicklow’s strong challenge in the opening round and feels they will have benefited from that outing. ‘I think itit’ss a faifair advantage, already hahaving a game under ththeir belt. They playeplayed in Parnell whewhere we’re going to hhave to play thethem as well. I tthink they’ll susurely have a look at that gamgame and realise that there’s areas that tthey’d like to improve on and, at the same ttime, they ran up a fair score in wwhat is not the biggest pitch in the world. They’ll take a bit of confidence from that.’

McEntee was really impressed with the character Louth showed, especially when the game wasn’t going quite as planned.

‘Well there was a couple of occasions where you’d say the crowd was beginning to get behind Wicklow and you’d say, ‘Is there a shock on the cards here?’ And every time Louth reacted well.

‘You would say they handled a tricky enough situation on a couple of occasions, they handled it pretty well. And their subs, they brought on a couple of subs that made an impact.’

However McEntee doesn’t believe that Louth v Meath is one of those rivalries where it means more to Louth to beat Meath than the other way round.

‘No, absolutely not. I mean our season is on the line. Everybody feels we’ve done a certain amount of work, we’ve a bit of momentum coming from the end of the League.

‘ It’s all on the line so I’d be very disappointed if it meant more to them than it did to us.’