Irish Daily Star - Inside Sport
We don’t just have the facilities to play big games
BEGGY SEES MEATH’S DECLINE IN LINE WITH DECLINE OF THE COUNTY’S HOME GROUND
DUBLIN playing football in Navan and Meath are back to back All-Ireland champions.
A nothing pre-Christmas National League game that didn’t bear even the slightest hallmark of one of those moments in time.
Yet, it was.
It sounds scarcely believable now but it remains the last time Dublin would visit Navan to play a League or Championship game in almost three and a half decades.
Meath have won more All-Irelands
(2) in the meantime than Dublin have made League or Championship appearances at Páirc Tailteann.
This afternoon (3pm) the Royals will entertain Dublin at Páirc Tailteann in league action for the first time since December 1988.
That’s over 34 years ago.
David Beggy was on the field that day, but it’s so long ago, the man nicknamed ‘Jinksy’ can barely recall it.
He has a memory of a bit of a mill up at one point – hardly surprisingly – but that’s about it.
Winners
It wasn’t a good day for Meath as Dublin ran out 1-12 to 0-4 winners with Eamon Heery and Bernard Flynn sent off.
The dearth of Meath/Dublin Championship action at Navan goes back even further – to 1980. That’s 44 years and counting.
There can hardly be any traditional sporting rivalry with an astonishing home and away stat like that at its core.
For a lot of this time, Meath — a force in the game from the mid-80s to the early noughties — were happy to play at Croke Park.
Beggy recalls one season in his playing career when Meath played at Croke Park on 10 occasions.
Parnell Park was Dublin’s home for League games back then.
That all changed in 2011 with the GAA’s decision to allow Dublin to move to Croke Park to play all their home league games.
It was marketed by the Association as the ‘Spring Series’ and is viewed as one of the factors in Dublin’s meteoric rise to dominate the game, with the Royals falling away badly.
With Dublin landing 17 of the last 18 provincial titles, it finally led to calls for last year’s Leinster semi-final with Meath to be moved to Navan in a bid to breathe new life into a dead duck competition.
But with a financial hit on the cards, the Leinster Council resisted the move, going with a semi-final double header also featuring Westmeath and Kildare. The attendance was 38,081.
The pulling power of Meath/Dublin that could once pack 80,000 into Croke Park is long gone with the rivalry all but dead.
Halving a potential attendance by going to Navan and creating a ticket scramble is something the Leinster Council weren’t prepared to countenance.
As for League ties between the pair, they’ve been sporadic with Meath spending a lot of the past 20 years in Division 2.
Dublin have played League and Championship games in Navan since the eighties, but against other counties.
These include a Leinster Championship win over Louth in 1995 and a
2008 Division 2 League final loss to Westmeath.
They’ve also played O’Byrne Cup and charity matches against Meath at Navan over the years, including the Sean Cox charity game back in late 2018, attended by 7,000 fans.
Fallen
Pairc Tailteann itself has fallen into a state of disrepair and is another factor in the lack of Dublin/Meath encounters at the venue.
The grass banks at the ground are not allowed to be opened due to health and safety restrictions.
The main stand was due to be replaced with €6.2 million in Government funding secured for the €12 million project.
But with Covid hitting GAA coffers hard and spiralling building costs, that work has been put on hold indefinitely.
In 2015 floodlights were erected but then taken down due to safety concerns.
“I think it’s wrong,” said Navan O’Mahonys man Beggy, who played games at the venue throughout his career for club and county.
“If we had the facilities you’d be screaming and shouting for a (Dublin Championship) match here, but we don’t.
“If you want to be a serious county you get your act together and until we do that, that’s the way it’s going to stay.
“The state of the place at the moment is not adequate. There are great plans. They are going to turn the pitch 180 degrees and rebuild it.
“That has been talked about for the last four or five years.
“It’s not fit for purpose. There is no point pretending. It would be lovely if it was. It would bring back great memories.
“There is nothing better than seeing the Dubs travelling around the country. I think it adds great fun to the towns and villages.
“It’s a bit of a letdown really to be honest with you.”
Coin
The other side of the coin is that Dublin were able to move straight into Croke Park without having to spend the millions other counties have on their stadiums.
They’re only just starting to build a centre of excellence at the old Hollystown golf club, near Blanchardstown.
And with plans for their Spawell site progressing slowly, their infrastructural spend has been minimal until the latter half of the last decade.
Plenty would say they were prudent moves – even if their clubs are crying out for pitches.
Meath GAA are reluctant to plunge themselves into major debt – with the legacy that would entail — by plouging ahead with work at Pairc Tailteann.
“We spent huge money on a Centre of Excellence out the Trim road (Dunganny), ”says Beggy.
“Maybe they were right to build that and maybe it was great long term vision and I do believe it was.
“Fintan Ginnity, who was a great man and chairman for Meath, he
drove that very, very well.
“But why we haven’t done something in Pairc Tailteann is a mystery to me.
“Even just concrete the whole lot into terraces, a bit like Portlaoise. It’s not going to cost that much.
“We can talk about excellence, at being the best at this and that but our county grounds are not fit for purpose. Are we pretending as well?
Long
“It’s a long, long time ago, but we were a big county in football.
“Now we are not and we are marking sure we are not because we don’t even have the facilities to play the big games.
“The population of Meath now – we are big. It’s a big county and it should have facilities that reflect the size of the county and it doesn’t.”
Despite all that and the awful decade of hidings Meath have endured at the hands of Dublin, Beggy says the lure of playing their neighbours in the capital is still there.
“People love to play Dublin in Croke Park,” he says.
“Talk to lads you played with and
they’ll talk about the quarter-final with Dublin – maybe from Westmeath or Wicklow – and we ran them for the first 20 minutes in Croke Park.
“We are still an amateur sport and for a lot of county footballers it is their ambition to get to play in Croke Park – not win an All-Ireland.
“Okay it (Croke Park) may be an advantage to Dublin but does it make them win any more All-Irelands than they should do? I don’t think so.
“Before they started winning it was one in nearly 30 years.
“Talent wins All-Irelands and that’s just it and they had a lot of talent in the last couple of years, without a doubt.
“When Sean (Boylan) left the
(Meath) setup (2005) it was open warfare.
“Like the civil war – lads with no plan in place. We just fell apart whereas Dublin got their act together.”
Beggy sees today’s game as“a complete and absolute total free hit”for Meath.
“I can’t imagine Dublin are going to take too many risks now,”he says.“I think they could put out a strong team. This is really, ‘Have a real go lads?’
“Yeah, it can be done. I do think it depends on what team Dublin put out. That’s more of an issue than what team we put out.
“We need Shane Walsh on the pitch at the moment because he can take a score.
“It’s a free shot. There’s a bit of a smell in the air, a bit of excitement around.
“The English (rugby) match has taken away from it a bit. It’s a long day.
Broke
“It’s a big day all round. Everybody in Meath will be broke from Cheltenham so there mightn’t be that much money to pay for the tickets to get to the match.”