‘That still feels like a dagger in my heart’ – Carr
Ex-Wee boss sums up Battle of the Boyne rivalry as old foes get ready to rumble
Even 22 years later, memories of that throbbing Saturday night in Páirc Tailteann still fill Paddy Carr with anguish. The old ground was “heaving” with some 20,000 for the ‘back door’ clash of Seán Boylan’s grizzled Meath trophy magnets and Carr’s emerging Louth.
And, as the clock ticked towards 70 minutes, the underdogs were four points up and in dreamland. Cue the nightmare.
Richie Kealy’s second green flag was followed – in the fourth minute of injury-time where three had been signalled – by Graham Geraghty’s last-gasp winning goal. Louth’s tormentor had arrived via helicopter from Wexford, where he was doubling as a best man that day.
“To this day, that still feels like a dagger in my heart,” Carr winces.
“Meath were a team of All-Ireland winners. We could see the improvements that were coming. And just the circumstances … the drama at the end where I was trying to get a player on the field, Cathal O’Hanlon, and the fourth official was telling me the time was up.”
His own contention is that the “occasion spooked the referee somewhat.”
A few days later came a reminder of just what the Lou th/ Me a th rival ry meant on the red side of the River Boyne divide.
“I was walking across West Street in Drogheda and there’s big steps coming down from St Peter’s Church,” he recalls. “There was an old canon and he must have recognised me; I was in a daze. And he pointed up at the door and he said, ‘Jesus, Paddy, if you had won that match, your auld head would have been in there with Blessed Oliver!’
“So that’s the kind of feeling in Louth about the significance of beating Meath. You would be canonised!”
The metaphor of St Oliver Plunkett, the martyred Irish archbishop, seems gruesomely apt. GAA managers aren’t hanged, drawn and quartered. Rather, once results go west and county board chiefs get twitchy, they are offered Hobson’s choice of walking the plank or the axeman cometh.
Abrupt
It’s just 14 months since Carr’s ill-starred tenure as Donegal boss came to an abrupt end after six league games. That isn’t the primary topic here – he is talking all things Louth and Meath ahead of this evening’s SFC group clash in Inniskeen because, quite simply, there is no better man to unravel the tangled web of this unique rivalry.
Yet it’s clear that he spies similarities between how his two-year Louth reign ended in 2003 (after SFC defeats to Dublin and then Cavan) and how his return to county management with Donegal, some two decades later, didn’t work out.
If Louth had held on against Meath in ’02, he is “sure it would have changed the history of Leinster football over the next few years. We were working hand in glove, ahead of the posse, with DCU. The kind of back-up that we had in terms of sports science and everything was just ahead of everyone.”
Niall Moyna, of DCU fame, was a huge influence on that Louth team; he was the manager’s “complete confidant”.
“I look back on those times fondly,” Carr insists. “There was hurt at the time, but I was really saddened that there wasn’t enough vision at the top table to allow that project to go forward.”
In between his two senior county stints, Carr’s finest managerial hour came with Kilmacud Crokes, whom he steered to All-Ireland club glory in 2009. Years earlier, he had received his formative football education in Kilmacud, the family having moved to Dublin from his native Donegal. But it’s two other counties that come to mind when assessing Carr’s long and varied GAA career. He moved to Meath at 17, studying for the missionary priesthood in Dalgan Park. He started playing with Walterstown, spent a few years in South America and then returned, starting for Walterstown when they lost the 1984 All-Ireland club final.
Either side of managing Louth, Carr twice took charge of the Meath minors. He taught in St Oliver’s CC, Drogheda, who enjoyed plenty of football success, while living in Navan. He retired some 18 months ago as principal of Coláiste na Mí in Navan, having by then moved to Louth. He has managed clubs in both counties – he’s now in charge of St Kevin’s, his local club in Philipstown near Ardee. In short, even as an ‘outsider’, he has lived and breathed Meath and Louth GAA for longer than he cares to remember.
His 2002 trauma was eclipsed by the far bigger controversy of Joe Sheridan’s wrongly awarded goal to win the 2010 Leinster final and extend the agony for Louth fans. “I wouldn’t be the only one to, at times, wonder if that has led to a lot of bad karma around Meath,” Carr speculates aloud.
But how does he sum up this ‘Battle of the Boyne’ rivalry? Do Meath qualify as Louth’s biggest rival? “Without a shadow of a doubt!” he fires back instantly.
During the Boylan years of plenty, Meath had bigger enemies in blue to contend with. “There was obviously a time where Meath wouldn’t have rat
“I wouldn’t be the only one to wonder if that has led to a lot of bad karma around Meath” Paddy Carr
ed Louth, but they certainly know they have to respect them now,” says Carr.
As he ponders this evening’s game, he sees “a hell of a lot at stake”. It’s a chance for Louth to cement their progress, firstly under Mickey Harte and now Ger Brennan. Colm O’Rourke’s young Royals, he ventures, have “a little bit further to go on that journey”.
Louth haven’t beaten Meath in SFC battle since 1975. “I do think that there’s enough nous in that management team to ensure that the Louth lads know the significance of what it would be to beat Meath at this stage of the championship. I’d give Louth the edge.”
Even if, as a keen spectator in Inniskeen, neutrality is the only option. “I’m glad,” he signs off, “that I’m hidden out here in the countryside!”