Kerry V Meath AI SF Semifinal 30th August 2009

[bcarrier]

JOC only picked Kennelly because Liam Hayes told him not to - cute hoors those Meath men 

Remember this


So Jack O'Connor walks out of O'Connor Park and into an All Ireland quarter-final. What then? Will he know for sure even 10 of his starting 15? He might. Or he might not. O'Connor has made almost every mistake in the book since his return. But it is his indecisiveness in building almost every line of his team, more than his foolishness in deciding upon Tadhg Kennelly as a central component of his team, which must be so worrying for the demanding army of Kerry football supporters whom Jack O'Connor is also lecturing, in recent weeks on the subjects of patience and loyalty.

Allowing Kennelly to walk back onto the Kerry team, after spending the best years of his adult life as an Australian Rules footballer, was madness. Whether it was mild lunacy borne out of desperation, only O'Connor himself can honestly answer, but the manager made a horse's ass of the notion that Kerry had a large stable of young, trustworthy bucks only dying to prove to the entire country that Kerry were a sure thing to win another four, maybe five, All Ireland titles in the next decade – same as the last.

Due to injury Kennelly has only been a bit-player in the Kerry year to date, but by naming him in the very nerve-centre of his team – in the middle of the field of all places – at the start of the championship, Jack O'Connor proved himself to be as innocent, if not arrogant, as the summer is long. He also is in the process of demolishing, all on his own, the fairly stout reputation he held as being one of the game's very best managers.

It's beginning to look as though O'Connor was indeed very lucky in winning two All Irelands in his first run as Kerry team boss. The people of Kerry are privately convinced this is the case. Soon enough, they may make their opinion public.

I'm not so sure that Kerry can steer this season to a wholly safe place and neither am I sure that their manager can save his own neck by the end of 2009.

Gooch should be motivated too ...

Cooper's career is heading for a dead end and only he can do something about it. With Colm Cooper, we are back in the land of make-believe! Is he the real thing or is he a part-man, part-cartoon character? Jack O'Connor would like it to be the former. We'd all like it to be true. Gaelic football needs Colm Cooper to live up to his extraordinary and maddeningly superior classification as one of the greatest Gaelic footballers the game has ever seen.

These days, unfortunately, this still young man is not even one of this summer's greatest footballers.

[Kerry Mike]

I'm sure Hayes will have another rant at us this weekend.

[bcarrier]

He might be too hard on ye ...arent ye better in all 15 positions !

How afraid should mayo or Meath be of Kerry ?

On a scale of one to 10, Mayo should be a seven or eight. Meath should be a 10. Simple difference is that while this Meath team and its first-year management team have restored some pride to the jersey, the team's individual parts have not gelled into a body at work. Mayo has been hard work these past three years for John O'Mahony, but the time and gruelling effort of the number two football brain in the country (Mickey Harte being number one) has clearly been well spent, and there is an evident force and self-belief to Mayo.

In individual comparisons with this Kerry team, from one to 15, Mayo might lose 12 of them (Keith Higgins, Ronan McGarrity or David Heaney, and Alan Dillon might be considered of superior quality to their corresponding number), whereas I think Meath would lose all 15.

It will be no surprise, therefore, if I predict that Mayo will finally find some justice this afternoon for the savage inconvenience of losing the 1996 All Ireland title to Meath. That title should have been Mayo's, as in the drawn game and the infamous replay they showed themselves to be the superior football team.

Mayo lost that All Ireland because the team did not have the guts when the finishing post came into view, to throttle Meath in the individual physical battles. Mayo backed off.

Most Meath teams do not back off but we're not entirely sure whether this side is good, bad or indifferent. The jury is still out and therefore Mayo should not wait around and should make a decisive statement early in the game.

[meathie]

well last post till Monday morning. I hope its a great game and more importantly that the Royals win, dont care how!!! come on the Royal!!!!!!!!

[Jinxy]

It'll be a wet day.
Hit them hard and hit them often.

[Sionnach]

Why has Tommy Walsh been dropped?

I thought it was the switch of him out to centre half forward that had helped disrupt the Dubs kickouts? (I didn't see the game just heard bits and pieces) Did he not play well in that match?
Is he not a far better player than Darren O'Sullivan?

Is he injured?

The answers to your 3 questions..no he wasn't brilliant against Dublin, he is not far better than Darran and he is not injured.

[INDIANA]

It'll be a wet day.
Hit them hard and hit them often.

like 1986 leinster final jinxy?

[Hardy]

A good piece on (our) Big Joe by Vincent Hogan in today's today's Indo - better than his usual guff. The Omagh part is absorbing. The word 'perspective' is over-used in these situations, but it's hard to avoid it here.

'It was hard. People were screaming, looking for loved ones'

Vincent Hogan talks to Meath's Joe Sheridan and discovers a footballer who loves the game as much as anyone but, having experienced the horror of the Omagh bombing at first hand, knows it's not a matter of life or death

Saturday August 29 2009

Sticks and stones. What's the worst thing they can call you? Slow? Lazy? Useless? They see you over-run a pass, jump too early for a high ball, kick a careless wide and you know exactly the sounds that will come spilling through the wire.

"Ya big @&*%$£ Sheridan!"

The voices never have a face. They just come at you, random and disembodied, digging for weakness. You remember that club game against Trim in 2007 just days before you walked out on inter-county football. How you were playing "atrocious" and ended up staring at your boots, as if there were riddles printed in the leather.

You heard none of it, mind. You could have been in outer space. But Mary, your sister and Seneschalstown's physio, said she was shocked by the depth of abuse that evening. It was as if you had been strolling the field with a sandwich-board declaring yourself God Almighty.

"Can't believe you didn't hear it..."

Look, you don't do precious. You've been cursed with this 'great white hope' thing since winning those two All-Ireland colleges with St Pat's and getting to the 2002 All-Ireland minor final with Meath. Back then, your opponents knew nothing but hardship and vapour trails. Sean Boylan even had you training with the Meath seniors at 18.

Your future was mapped out like the plot of a beautiful novel. All you needed to do was stay breathing.

Maybe these things are pre-written in higher places. You see, you made your senior Championship debut against Laois in 2004. You lost. Should have been against Wicklow in the first round, but you missed that through suspension. A little flare-up in an U-21 game. Gave a referee some aggro. Silly.

The year ended with an extra-time one-point defeat to Fermanagh in Enniskillen. You missed two frees from straight in front of the posts that, ordinarily, you'd almost back-heel over. Just tried too hard. Forced the thing. Froze.

"I'll never forget it," you smile now. "I was just worrying too much about it. Fermanagh came back to beat us and I had to take a lot of responsibility for that. A few people were getting on to me after. I suppose you take the good with the bad.

"Bottom line, I was expected to kick them over and we should have won. To be honest with you, it was my fault that we didn't."

Great white hope indeed.

THE red light probably saved them. They'd just stopped to ask directions to the GAA pitch. "You'd best go right up the town," said the woman. "But I'm not sure you'll be let. There's a bomb scare."

John Mitchells of Birmingham were playing a match in Omagh. Women's football. The Sheridans had seen it as an opportunity to catch up with old friends from across the water. They'd toyed with the idea of travelling that morning. Lobbed it about. Squeezed it for ripeness.

Eventually, Damien senior brought it to a head.

"Sure feck it, what else would we be doing?"

So there they were, engine ticking, at traffic lights on the corner of Market Street and Dublin Road in this nondescript Tyrone town. Just after three in the afternoon on a clammy Saturday. August 15, 1998. Muttering little curses about the looming inconvenience.

"Probably be sent around the houses now..."

And it happened. Joe Sheridan remembers the bang and the blast wave. He talks of "a gush of wind", of the roof of the family mini-bus being sucked in on top of them, then snapping back out to its normal shape like it was a biscuit tin. He remembers the shards of glass and metal, the lumps of flying masonry, the blizzard of bits and pieces go sweeping up past the traffic-lights.

And he remembers his father's voice, how Damien recognised the smell of explosive from his time working in the mines. He remembers the word "BOMB" and how, suddenly, everyone was mouthing it. Screaming it.

By a small miracle, the windows of the bus never shattered. All around them was a scene of splintered destruction, but the Sheridans hadn't a single graze between them. His mother, Geraldine -- a nurse by profession -- jumped out immediately and began tending the wounded. The mini-bus became a makeshift ambulance, ferrying wounded up to Tyrone County Hospital.

An ambulance with children sitting in silent witness of things children should never see.

"Just mayhem to be honest," remembers Joe, then a 14-year-old. "They were throwing people into the back of the van and trying to get them up to the hospital as quickly as possible.

"It was horrifying. One young lad who we've actually been up to visit a few times, his whole side was blown off him. A water main had burst and he was lying there, this flood of blood and glass spilling down over him. He had a couple of buckets of shrapnel pulled out of him and would need so many operations. An incredible character, he made a big recovery and is into stuff like go-karting now.

"It was hard. There were people lying on the ground and we were just making room for them in the back of the van. Unbelievable. We were among the first people up to the hospital. People screaming. Looking for someone missing. Wondering if their loved ones were dead.

"We just waited around the car park while mom and dad were inside. Stayed there 'til evening time. I remember there wasn't a word said in the van on the way home. Two and a half, maybe three hours. We were in shock. We went back up a while later for the blessing of the graves.

"But you never forget the faces. It took a while. You'd go to bed at night and you'd be thinking about what you saw."

Joe Sheridan loves football as much as anyone. His whole family loves it. He still gets a kick out of seeing his 85-year-old granny in the stand. But he knows it's not a matter of life and death.

He knows the difference between tragedy and a bad day on the frees.

MAYBE the worst thing about walking away was the epidemic of rumour spawned.

People's arithmetic got skewed. Two and two added up to six. If he couldn't play for Meath, it surely had to be because of a row. No 23-year-old turned his back on county football without some class of a ruction. Did they?

Except, there was no ruction, no dramatic splintering of his relationship with Colm Coyle. Joe Sheridan just stopped loving the game in '07. And the more he slipped out of love with it, the harder he tried to resuscitate things. He trained when he needed to rest. He tried to squeeze juice from a stone.

About three weeks before the first game against Dublin, he had considered leaving. All the sensors in his body registered trouble. He felt no freshness, no joy. His dad encouraged him against anything rash but, by the day of the replay, rashness seemed his only hope.

Coyle had hauled him off the field approaching half-time and, if Joe should have been mortified, all he felt was a terrible emotional and physical fatigue. Two days after the club game against Trim, he took himself to training in Navan.

The funny thing is he brought gear too. Why? He's not so sure. Maybe he imagined Coyle might talk him out of it when they spoke. But the manager didn't try to. "Colm, I can't do this anymore," said Joe. "I think I'm going to have to pull myself off the panel."

"Okay," said Coyle. "If you're not enjoying it, maybe you're better off."

"Well, to be honest, there's no point me being here. It's benefiting no-one. Myself or the team."

"Look, see how you go," said Coyle. "The door is always open. I appreciate you coming to me, it must be a hard thing to do. And I'm not going to pull and drag out of you to come back. Whenever you want to come back, come back."

Sheridan remembers, "I couldn't believe I was doing it, to be honest. But it just had to be done, simple as that. When I look back now, it probably improved me as a player.

"My head was pretty clear when I left. It was like a weight off my shoulders. As I walked out, I met Graham (Geraghty) coming down the corridor. 'Everything alright?' he asked. 'Yeah, yeah, grand.'

"I went one way, Colm went the other. I knew the players out on the pitch were watching and, probably, talking about what was happening. But I was clear in the head. I just got in the car, went home and told dad."

Two things happened in the days that followed. Team-mates rang, trying to encourage him to return. And rumour became rampant. The story ran of a row between player and manager. It was always going to.

"I knew that," sighs Joe. "Anyone (who) drops themselves off a panel, everyone is wondering, 'what's after happening there?' I knew people all over the place were talking. So many stories came back to me and my family. Ridiculous stuff about what was going on. You just had to laugh because, no, nothing happened between us."

Meath would accelerate spectacularly into late summer, before coming a cropper in the All-Ireland semi-final against Cork. Sheridan watched it all, never feeling the remotest bit of envy. Only the day of the Cork game, did he feel faint flickers of regret.

Consolation came with Seneschalstown. Against expectation, they would win the county title. The area was still in distress after the school bus tragedy that killed five local girls and, somehow, football offered a tiny and momentary prism of escape. For Joe Sheridan, the achievement had an intimate dimension.

His dad was manager, Mary was physio (assisted by his ma), brothers Brian and Damien junior and, maybe, half a dozen cousins were playing. His aunt was chairwoman of the club. Actually, the day they beat Navan O'Mahonys in the county final replay was, arguably, the most pleasing he's known in football.

It could have become a fairytale too. They took St Vincent's to a replay in the first round of the Leinster Club Championship. Should have beaten them, but didn't. And the following St Patrick's Day, Vincent's won the All-Ireland.

Inches.

IN A sense, few things define Joe Sheridan quite like his candour.

When he was named man of the match after Meath's recent All-Ireland quarter-final defeat of Mayo, not a single impulse in his body was triumphal. If anything, he felt relief. For, seven years after Boylan brought him in to train with marquee boys like Geraghty and Trevor Giles and Darren Fay, Sheridan sees his inter-county record as one of resolute under-achievement.

He wasn't even on Eamonn O'Brien's starting 15 at the beginning of this Championship and, if his four points from play in the Mayo game spoke of burgeoning confidence, Joe understands how frail the line is separating good days from bad.

If there is a difference in him this year, it's in his fitness. He's just trained smarter. With Colm Brady setting the schedules, Sheridan has shed almost a stone and a half in body weight. He looks pared down to a level of athleticism that was never previously apparent. If the weight loss suggests certain things about his past, Sheridan doesn't hide from the suggestion.

"It probably was, yeah," he agrees when it is proposed that losing the weight was maybe an imperative. "At the beginning of the year, I was a bit too heavy. I knew that myself. Colm and I just had a chat about it. He said he'd work with me.

"It's all about just pushing yourself harder more than anything. In years gone by, I might not have gone that extra step. This year I just got it into my head that this was what had to be done. It was make or break for me.

"The thing that Colm emphasised was that I'd need to rest too. It's just common sense really. In '07, I was probably training too much. I was just training almost to say I was training and not getting any benefit from it. You'd be doing stupid things just to be able to say, 'oh, I did an extra bit...'

"To be honest, I owe Colm a hell of a lot. He's taught me that everything should be done for a purpose. Looking back, I was training between sessions. I might just go to the gym or do an extra run. And you end up wasting all your energy levels. Your body is tired and you get fed up. I needed a rest in the end. Maybe that's the big difference this year. I wouldn't say I've done more. It's just probably I've done the right stuff.

"And I feel so much fresher."

HE was at Kerry's demolition of Dublin and remembers a Dublin fan get up with 25 minutes gone and take his four children from the stadium.

And he couldn't help think how that was a damn strange message to be giving to kids. What was the Dubs fan saying? That failure amounted to some kind of betrayal? A disgrace? Listen, this Meath team could write the book on bad days.

Just over a year ago, they fell 20 points behind in an All-Ireland qualifier against Limerick. Sheridan sat on the bench through the worst of it. He reckons they were "18 or 19 down" when he got the call. Humiliated.

Earlier in the season, Meath had spilled a 10-point lead against Wexford. Who could explain how a team can bookend such trauma with two All-Ireland semi-final appearances? But that's Meath. That's football. That's human.

Tomorrow, they give themselves a puncher's chance against Kerry. They are outsiders and that's fine.

Joe Sheridan has never been this high up the Championship mountain and senses a giddiness ripple through the county. The view is good. Meath, he says, are hungry and honest and ready to leave everything they possess on the Croke Park field.

And that's pretty much all that matters now. Beyond it, who can say how fate will take a hand?

Who can ever say?

- Vincent Hogan

[Halfquarter]

John O'Keeffe in the IT has more or less written off Meath,I 'm surprised that he is so blunt,especially as they are playing
his own county.

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/sport/2009/0829/1224253464763.html

[Hardy]

Yes - saw that. Surprising, but refreshing too. No ould plamás - just calls it as he sees it. He says Meath will have to "work their socks off" just to stay in the game - no chance of winning.

[comethekingdom]

Yes - saw that. Surprising, but refreshing too. No ould plamás - just calls it as he sees it. He says Meath will have to "work their socks off" just to stay in the game - no chance of winning.

I hope he's right.

[Fear ón Srath Bán]

The Gooch is a doubt with a hip injury! 

[Halfquarter]

Heard Dara O Cinneide saying on RTE1 that the 'Gooch' has to have a fitness test before a decision is made about him playing.
No mention of it anywhere else though. Without the 'Gooch',its a different ball game !

[marym]

It seems he has been in trouble for the past 8 days. Has been having physio on the hip but has not responded to treatment.Newstalk say Paul O  Connor from kenmare is coming in for him.

[johnpower]

Just heard about the Gooch ,I hope the late withdrawl of a key player does not impact the contest like last weeks match . I expect Meath to hit the ground running and not let kerry get any momentum going .Paul O Connor maybe included for his free taking .