Captain wants Meath to regain winning mentality

WHO is the youngest ever player to captain a Meath team in an All-Ireland adult final?

That accolade will surely belong to Syddan’s Daire Rowe (right) when he leads his side out in Portlaoise for Saturday’s All-Ireland Junior decider against Kerry.

Still a number of months short of his 21st birthday, Daire has already had the honour of making a victory speech on the Hogan Stand podium at Croke Park after leading the Royals to the provincial crown following the victory over Louth.

‘It was a great honour when I was handed the captaincy at the start of the campaign and I said I’d just try and embrace it and take it game by game and see how it would go,’ Daire said in the buildup to the final.

‘Here we are now looking forward to an All-Ireland final, I feel so fortunate. At the start of the year we didn’t look any further than the first game against Kildare.

‘Once we got over that hurdle, played well and reflected on it, we thought this is a good team - we can go far in this competition. I think we just looked at Leinster then and when we won that, well naturally we wanted to go all the way and win an All-Ireland.’

Over the years, for one reason or another Meath haven’t had the best of preparations for the junior championship and this year wasn’t much different, with Conor O’Donoghue only appointed as manager a short while prior to the start of the campaign.

‘We had a challenge match against Lucan Sarsfield prior to the Kildare game and we barely had 15, with lads doing college exams and some playing with their clubs,’ Daire continued. ‘I think we had just one training session after that and it was straight into the Kildare game.

‘It probably wasn’t easy playing with lads that you barely knew, but on the day things just clicked. It was only afterwardsards that we re realised that we hadad a fairly good team and could go places.

‘It was a great at experience getting - to play in

Croke Park on Leinster final day. The games came thick and d fast. There was just st a couple of weekseks between every match, atch, which is what players want. It was greateat to have two home games and we didn’t need much incentive playing Louth in a Leinster final in Croke Park.’

Like his father Cormac before him, who lined out with the county at senior level during the mid and late 1970s, winning a NFL medal following the victory over the then All-Ireland champions Dublin in 1975, Daire also has aspiration to make it at ssenior grade. He has already represented resentrepresented the county at MMinor and U-21 levlevel and sees the junior grade as a stepping stostone to that gogoal.

‘This present juniojunior squad is basically sicallybasically an under-23 one, whwhich is great for players becbecause it is a big jump straight into senior from Minor and Under-21. It is good to have the junior competition for bringing lads on that extra step and developing them further. Hopefully a lot of fellas from this team can progress to senior.’

Most of this junior team haven’t grown up experiencing successful Meath teams. Many of them were very young or indeed weren’t even born during the last golden era for the county when All-Ireland senior titles were captured in 1996 and again in 1999.

‘I think it comes back to a winning mentality. we don’t know what it was like to be supporting successful Meath teams and travelling to Croke Park and watching them win All-Irelands. It’s important that the present generation live up to expectations and grasp that winning mentality again.

‘I’ve been following Meath from when I was very young and at that stage it was just considered a day out, but as you get older you get a sense of what it all means and especially what it means to win.’