“Do you see anybody closing the gap with Dublin in the short term, Sean?”
“Yeah… Meath.”
He’s almost insulted you’d ask.
Seán Boylan doesn’t fear Dublin. He didn’t win All-Irelands – four to be exact – or Leinster titles – eight to be exact – by bowing to others and refusing to dream. He doesn’t accept that a team from Meath can’t go out and take on 15 men from Dublin and better them. That’s not in his make-up.
So when you ask a man like Seán Boylan about Dublin’s recent dominance, particularly in the province, he can’t be having words like impossible.
“It has to happen, you have to believe you can do it because there’s still only 15 playing. They’re not eating any more spuds or anything than anybody else and if you start to believe that they’re invincible, then sure look, don’t get involved in sport.
“There’s always that chance and you always feel that you have that chance. It’s very easy to say, if it doesn’t work out for Mick O’Dowd in the first year or the second year, get rid of him but, if something’s coming together, you’ve got to have that patience to go through that. And then once you crack it, you’re sort of there.”
If anyone would know…
There have been suggestions that the current Meath team are too small and lightweight, that they’ve developed a lot of nippy players and not necessarily the physical threat that Boylan’s top sides would’ve possessed along with their skill.
“You need the mix,” the legendary Dunboyne man said at Croke Park on Tuesday at the renewal of Allianz’s sponsorship of the National League.
“But you can only play with what you have. If you have Kevin Reilly gone, Brian Menton gone, Stephen Bray gone, Conor Gillespie not available to play, they would’ve been four pillars of the team and when you have that smaller population, when you lose one or two, it can have an effect.”
Smaller population, you say? So are Dublin really at an advantage? Not necessarily. With bigger populations comes other problems.
“You’ve got to give credit to Dublin for what they did 10 or 12 years ago when they changed the structure and when they got so many people involved in coaching,” the former International Rules manager said. “For a good few years there, they hadn’t even an under-21 team but they’ve changed all that. You see the likes of Paul Griffin and Jayo (Jason Sherlock) and all those lads coming into under-13 and 14 Dublin squads and they take them as far as they can and hopefully to a minor final.
“Now, you don’t use that as an excuse because your own county’s not going well because there are still so many people playing the game. But you should apply yourself in the same way and a lot of counties don’t get the ex-players involved and you’re losing an awful lot of experience and I think that’s daft.
“Kilkenny manage it very well. There are lads in different pockets of the county coaching – say you had 45 or 50 lads playing and so many are picked to go on to the development squads, the other players aren’t left behind in Kilkenny. They’re still coached.
Boylan is still wholly immersed in football at all levels. He’s down at pitches before 9 o’clock some mornings and he sees strength in some of the smaller areas in his county – like Summerhill. It’s a lesson that the rest of Ireland can learn on the All-Ireland stage.
“Of all the places I went, this [Summerhill] was the most successful,” he said. “These are the lads, when it’s all over, they’ll still be playing Gaelic Football. I had seen Dunshaughlin three years ago playing under-21 and they were beaten. That Dunshaughlin squad had won three Féiles but there was only one lad from the Féile playing. That was the fall-off, it was huge.
“Years ago, you learnt how to survive playing with the older lads. The bigger clubs in Meath may suffer. They mightn’t get as many through as the smaller clubs because Dunboyne, Dunshaughlin, Ratoath, Ashbourne, they have huge populations so they might have 60 or 70 lads for minor or under-17s, whatever it is. Now, in the smaller clubs, they’re playing 17s and minors and they’re playing under-21s and they’re getting 22/23 games where as some of the young fellas in the bigger clubs might only get five or six for the year.”
After all, this is just about player development. This is about finding just 15 men to take the field on any given Sunday. Is anyone trying to suggest that Meath can’t do that? That can’t develop 15 players like Dublin can?
Don’t tell Seán Boylan that.
