Meath must win to keep continuity
THE most revealing aspect to the fallout in Meath was how little there was. When the Meath County Board gathered in conclave last week, the talk was less of brimstone and fire and more about keeping house.
The main focal point for discussion was the cutting of two administration staff from the county board office rather than the traumatic exit of their footballers from the Leinster Championship the previous week at t he hands of Westmeath.
There is both comfort and discomfort in that for Mick O’Dowd as he heads north today, his three-year tenure as Meath manager hanging by the most slender of threads.
Granted a five-year term, with a review t hat ki c ks in after t hi s year’s Championship, how they fare in testing circumstances in Omagh is likely to colour O’Dowd’s view of the future and his board’s view of him.
The sense in Meath is that he still wants it, but lose big today and it is over. Any other kind of result might just be enough to buy time, which says much about how fires in bellies have been doused off the field as well as on.
This was the board that unsuccessfully sought to oust O’Dowd’s predecessor Séamus ‘Banty’ McEnaney prior to the start of the 2012 Championship, but after a four- day period that saw a fancied minor team lose to Longford, their juniors to Wexford and their seniors cede a 10-point lead there was not a peep.
That can be looked on two ways, either their spirit has been cowed or there is a realisation that lashing out at an obvious target is a futile exercise, when what is needed is to correct the errors of the past.
They expected the good times to keep rolling under Seán Boylan, rather than realising that the legacy of that era was not something that could be inherited butut i nstead needed t o bee worked on.
While others had fastened on to the value of development squads, Meath initiall y only implemented them notionally at Under 14 and U16 levels.
That may go some way to explaining why they have come close to falling off the radar at under-age level — their last Leinster U21 success was in 2001, while their loss to Longford this month will extend their barren run in the minor grade to eight years.
That has been addressed; there are now developmental squads at every grade from U12 upwards, but with a rising population in excess of 185,000, they are fire-fighting for resources, with just four full-time coaches in the county.
There are chinks of light and, while housekeeping can be scoffed at, there is a sense of a corner being turned.
When Brendan Dempsey took over as treasurer three years ago, the board operated a loss in excess of €180,000, which was transformed into a surplus of €140,000 last year.
It will be needed — a mortgage of €1m has to be serviced as the price for developing a fit-for-purpose complex on their centre of excellence in Dunganny, while a strategic report is in the process of being developed which will require funding to enact.
‘When that plan is ready, then we will go to the local authority, who fund coaches in soccer and rugby, the Leinster Council and Croke Park to get the support that we need and I would be confident that we would be able to do that,’ says Dempsey.
That ball had already started rolling. A steering committee, headed up by Boylan, Colm O’Rourke and Gerry McEntee, to oversee development has been established and former county player Séamus Kenny, who only retired last year, has been appointed as operations manager. There is a painful awareness that what ththey are doing now should have happened an age ago. ‘Dublin have set the benchmark in terms of what they had planned for and which tthey implemented and the rest of us are playing catch-up,’ explains Kenny.
All this is long-term and will not excuse O’Dowd of underachievement — in three seasons the only success had been to take the team out of Division 3 which would have been seen as a given — while there has been a naivety about how they have played, underlined by their collapse against Westmeath, which has nothing to do with structures.
‘Meath football has always prided itself on that spirit and that is a core principle of what we are about but maybe that has been lost over the past number of years,’ concedes Kenny, who argues that this is not a time for a knee-jerk reactions.
After 23 years of rule under Boylan, Meath have got hooked on quick-fix solutions — Kenny played under six different managers. The plan was to move away from such turnover when O’Dowd was appointed. ‘ The county needs a bit of continuity. We need to build for the future and a change of management would mean starting that process off again, which may be not what the current panel needs.’
But what they need and what they will get is pretty much in their own hands today.