'Robbie will have players bouncing. He doesn’t bring negativity or make it all about him'
Declan Bogue
GET A LOAD of Bernard Flynn, hopping with excitement.
If things were different, he might have been out there on the sideline this Sunday, on Robbie Brennan’s shoulder as he was with Kilmacud Crokes.
There’s no delicate way to put this, but his face didn’t fit. His previous critiques were not appreciated in certain quarters. However, he has held his counsel and he will continue to do so.
With Meath colours strapped to everything bolted or concreted down, everything else melts away. It doesn’t matter.
Meath. Are. Back. So back. You best believe.
“Meath will be there whenever we are gone and whether we win or lose. You look at what is happening in the county now and the belief the young lads have. I’m 60 last week and I haven’t seen it in years,” says Flynn.
“I’m thrilled and delighted to see what’s happening. When have you last seen a Meath team really buying into something?”
And it needn’t end any time soon. He assembles his arguments and counterpoints that accentuates the possibilities of Meath and diminishes Donegal.
“There’s a ferocious pressure on Donegal. On Jim McGuinness and bringing back Michael Murphy. I think we have a serious chance. A serious chance.”
He’s on a roll. Go with him.
“Look at (Oisín) Gallen since Murphy came back? How many of the forwards have improved? He’s such a powerful leader and figure that maybe too much has gone through him.
I didn’t think he would have played so much football and I am not sure that’s the right thing for them to win an All-Ireland. If you were going into an All-Ireland final and Michael Murphy is your main man, then I wouldn’t be disappointed if I was the opposition manager.”
The spotlight is shone on his own.
“You look at the difference in our players. The smiles and the confidence. We had Andy McEntee and Colm O’Rourke, Banty McEnaney before that, but it hasn’t been easy for a lot of those players, good players.
“There is an atmosphere now that is the right atmosphere. One thing about Robbie is that he will have players bouncing. There is fun, there is craic. He doesn’t abuse players or bring negativity or make it all about him. He genuinely doesn’t and I think that’s been massive for those lads. Massive.”
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35 years ago, he was one of those boys of summer. A player in his mid-20s, a side-parting almost as impressive as his sidestep and Vil Kilmer cheekbones.
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Meath and Donegal met in the All-Ireland semi-final. There were no false hits or sneaky jabs. Instead, it was honest brutality. But brutality none the less.
Donegal had them warned in a way.
The week before the match, a young Irish Independent journalist Vincent Hogan went to The Great Northern Hotel and breakfasted with the owner, and Donegal manager for the third time, one Brian McEniff.
For a few weeks since they had beaten Armagh in the Ulster final, a whole slew of young journalists had the road to Bundoran flattened when they were told to come on right ahead to Donegal. For many it was their first time in a place that operated on a different time zone. The pace of life was slow, the conversations slower, the pints thicker and faster.
According to ‘Sam’s for the Hills’, the definitive study on Donegal football of that time by Dónal Campbell and Damian Dowds, two themes emerged in all the pieces; that Donegal was a gorgeous county, but they had no chance against Meath.
During Hogan’s breakfast and interview, McEniff was the subject of no less than six interruptions with telephones trilling. Some were business calls, others were offering advice on how to handle Meath.
One woman from Wicklow had made a phonecall to McEniff, advising him to make sure his players jumped higher than the Meath men. ‘Can you believe it?’ asked McEniff.
In this era of some intercounty managers being, ahem, ‘sponsored’, McEniff might have been the busiest man you could ever encounter. Married to his wife Cautie of Cork, he was also a father of 10.
Can you imagine the chaos? And yet within his hotels he moved among the people, paying casual compliments as ice-breakers, taking calls, occasionally knocking out a stanza on one of the pianos as he passed.
Nothing beats playing, they say. As talk turned to Meath, McEniff looked across the golf links attached to his hotel and the Atlantic swell and said, “No question, I’d give all of this away just to be able to play against Meath.
“Christ, I’d give an arm and a leg to play in that game. I’d give everything.”
Later, Hogan went and attended a training session in Ballybofey and moved among the players.
Donal Reid – the inheritor of McEniff’s No 5 jersey, told him, “I suppose it doesn’t really matter what we say, people just won’t believe it. But there’s something different this time. We’re actually dying for this game to happen.”
How times change. Donegal ended up being the one county this week that did not give any media access. As for watching a training session, you’ll recall how they erected a ‘privacy fence’ to keep anyone from watching their training sessions ahead of last year’s preparations.
Back to the game. After victory was secured, Meath players felt the press did them no favours.
David Beggy said to reporters after, “It was crazy for you fellows to write off Donegal like that. They came at us as I knew they would and they did not stand on ceremony. I wonder do people appreciate how hard it was out there? We got absolutely nothing without a fight.”
Flynn himself told reporters: “I’m sore, very sore. Above all the games Meath have played over the last few years, seldom has our character put more to the test than on this occasion.
“They had us on the rack but I’m convinced the spirit and heart in this team is greater than at any time over the last four years.”
It wasn’t all one way. In ‘Sam’s for the Hills’, Declan Bonner recalled, ‘Tony (Boyle) and me went for the first high ball that came in. As I went for it, Mick Lyons came across me and took me out of it. I remember thinking that if I wanted to play at this level I would have to start learning pretty quickly.’
Some Donegal lads knew the ropes. Martin Shovlin was a man renowned for a pain threshold so high it was invisible to the naked eye. He won man of the match but nobody shipped more punishment. Barry McGowan said, ‘I warmed up for Martin Shovlin two or three times after tackles that would have killed an ordinary man. He had treatment and was taken off on a stretcher each time.’
Anthony Molloy said, ‘That would have been one of the most physical games we ever played in. I saw Shovlin’s shin bone, but he just got up and played on.’
Put it down to our addiction to nostalgia or the fact that the national broadcaster had three lead Gaelic football analysts in Pat Spillane, Colm O’Rourke and Joe Brolly who played up to the time when men were men and sheep ran scared.
The punishing and attritional nature of football back then became glorified and fetishised.
If you’re into that sort of thing – and the vast majority of us are – then Flynn had one of the greatest tales of ultra-violence.
It was a night in Páirc Tailteann and the four-game saga with Dublin in ’91 was coming into focus. A team meeting a few nights previous carried the menacing message that training had gone soft. That it came from Mick Lyons provoked a few gulps.
So there’s Flynn in training skipping around on the top of the turf. He shimmied by Lyons and felt a thump. Words were exchanged and Flynn felt if the opportunity presented itself, he would let Lyons – yes, Mick Lyons – have it.
“Anyway Mick did it again and I turned around and hit him as hard as I could,’ said Flynn.
“Next thing, all I could see was blood. I split his nose down the middle. I spent the rest of that training session looking around, left, right and centre. I genuinely had a fear that I was going to wake up in hospital.”
After the session, he had to go to the dressing room. It was a silent room. Flynn went to the showers and found himself a spot where he could monitor those coming in.
Lyons came into the steam and Flynn had his fist closed. Lyons threw his arm around Flynn and started congratulating him for his courage and nastiness. Flynn attempted an apology that was waved off. Lyons went into the shower and shampooed himself, the suds and the blood producing a pink foam. It wasn’t until he was in his car that he could breathe easy.
It got them to a certain level. It might have been to their detriment. He is living proof.
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In 2009, Flynn was the first to push back on this stuff. By then he had spent 15 years in constant pain from his exertions on the football field.
He took his first pain-killing injection in 1987 for his hip. At 44 he had a hip replacement.
For years and years he felt the jab of a needle to get through Leinster and All-Ireland campaigns. Into the hip and into the ankle.
He was one of the lucky ones, though. Teammate and surgeon Gerry McEntee had advised him to take out health insurance and keep up the payments. He had the backing to get an operation, carried out by Dr Kieran O’Rourke, a brother of Colm.
After the hip operation, Dr O’Rourke told him he would need another operation: a knee replacement as it had become so unstable.
“We thought it served us well years ago. You know what? It actually cost us,” says Flynn now.
“That Meath team we had, because of that attitude, we won two All-Irelands and we should have won a third or a fourth. And it was all to do with pressure and that mad lunatic stuff in training. We killed each other, we hopped off each other and were as thick as fuck.
“Honestly, I am one of the few actually spoke out and said it cost us. I love Sean Boylan. We are a close bunch, but if I told you the stuff we got up to, you would not believe it. The training matches were worse than we ever had. It was vicious and ferocious.
“It got us to a level, but I’ll tell you what, it was some price to pay.”
Which brings us back to that 1990 All-Ireland semi-final when he broke Donegal with his 2-2.
His first shot came back off the post and hit Donegal goalkeeper Gary Walsh on the back of the head. The second arrived late on and he sold his trademark jink and laced the ball across Walsh to the net. He got his share of punishment that day too.
“I will not tell you a lie, I broke my sternum. Martin Gavigan caught me right down the front,” he recalls.
“It was the hardest day I ever had. The physicality that Donegal brought probably cost them. But I knew they were coming.
“If you watched the full game, it wasn’t a great game of football. It was a pissy, slidy day. But the honest hitting in that match was as hard as I ever felt.”
Donegal were so hopped up and eager that their football never got going. They hit 13 wides to Meath’s three.
Meath were left in rag order for the All-Ireland final. The semi-final took a lot out of them and they lost the final 0-11 to 0-9 to Cork.
And yet, they emerged from the battle with an admiration for Donegal.
“A great bunch of lads. Donegal, a great honest bunch with serious talent,” insists Flynn.
“I didn’t realise what a brilliant human being he was. He was the vice-captain in Australia then for the Compromise Series a few months later. You ask anybody, the respect that man had among the Jack O’Shea’s and some of the greats; Paul Curran, Eamon Heary, Keith Barr, Bomber Liston, Martin was magnificent in that series as a leader and as a human being. What a man.”
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Back to Sunday. He’s talking himself into a frenzy. He thinks, with some reason given his player of the month status, that Jordan Morris is the one to watch.
“He was Meath’s best player in the league. I think he’s nearly unplayable right now and he is only coming back ten weeks after that injury. Whoever gave a dusting to Johnny McGrath like that?” he asks.
“I don’t think Donegal have a man to mark him.
“If you look at Shaun Patton in the first half, Monaghan got so much right. If Meath are there or thereabouts with fifteen minutes to go, I think they will win it. The pressure on Donegal, the pressure on Murphy and McGuinness, individually, I look at Donegal’s second half against Galway last year, that’s in their locker. It’s in their locker.
“There is a little chink in them. If Meath can hang in, I promise you…”
The county is awash with green and gold. The optimism and belief is back.
Meath are back.
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