“People ask was it pre-planned by Sean Boylan? In my opinion, absolutely not. That’s not his style.”
Peter Canavan
A SCIENTIFIC study conducted in 2019 found that driven athletes were likely to “suspend their sense of right and wrong” in order to win.
Researchers found that competitors they analysed would abandon their conventional moral responsibilities once they stepped out on the pitch.
We didn’t need a scientific study to tell us that in the GAA.
The condition is long established.
We call it white line fever.
Men that can appear perfectly rational for six days of the week lose the run of themselves completely on a Sunday afternoon.
Some of them are players. Some of them are managers. Some are supporters.
Their suspension of right and wrong lasts for two hours.
When the game is over, they go back to being the man that stops at the side of the road to help change a tyre, or that cares for their elderly parents, or who has a house full of children that they scold for not saying ‘please’.
Football pitches are strange places that make men do strange things.
Seán Boylan’s great Meath teams fell into focus this week following the RTÉ documentary on his life and times in football, which was criticised is some quarters for airbrushing out the negative aspects of how his teams conducted themselves.
There were reports that a chorus of “Aye, what about ’96?!” could be heard from Donemana to Dunmoyle during its screening last week.
When Meath beat Tyrone in that infamous All-Ireland semi-final, football was still a fairly lawless affair.
It was a very different sport to the one we know.
Football prided itself on levels of physicality that could border on inhumane.
In the absence of a blatant slap right in front of the referee that he might have to deal with, it was every man for himself.
John McDermott ploughed into Peter Canavan as he took a shot early on that day.
Any player knows that the best time to clatter a man is when he’s in the act of shooting.
His body is completely unprotected and wide open. He is at your mercy, entirely.
It left Tyrone’s best forward hobbling about with what turned out to be a bad ankle ligament injury that would hamper him for years thereafter.
But by Canavan’s own admission, it was the kind of tackle he’d become used to dodging.
“It actually happened a couple of times that year before in the Ulster Championship against Derry,” he wrote in a column in 2015.
“In the process of kicking the ball, Brian McGilligan clattered into me, but I spun off him, bounced up and avoided injury.”
No man would ever think Brian McGilligan was a dirty footballer.
He could give it, but he could take it too.
As well as Canavan’s busted ankle, Meath left Ciaran McBride and Brian Dooher in head bandages that day, and they did it without facing any punishment.
The visible scars healed more quickly than the deep psychological damage it left.
Tyrone have always been sore about it, but Meath were a team that not only knew what it took to win, but also what they could get away with.
Leaving a bit on a man when you got the chance was simply the order of the era.
Truth told, you’d still be encouraged to do it now if you had half an inkling you’d get away with it.
The difference between then and now is not in how players think or act, but in how the game is policed.
The GAA began to clean the sport up after the embarrassment of that year’s Meath-Mayo brawl.
What we have now is a far cleaner, crisper sport in which the skills can be showcased.
The game was the problem then, not Meath or Sean Boylan.
Teams that desperately want to win will find ways and means.
They will suspend right and wrong.
The great aristocrats, Kerry and Dublin, are no angels. Never have been.
The difference between now and then is not how far players will push the boundary, but rather where the boundaries are.
There’s no chance any team would get away with it now, but the brutality that could exist has been replaced by a sneaky, snide element in the game that is far less obvious, but just as damaging and ten times harder to stamp out.
The methods of warfare are much changed.
Physical means are no longer an option for defenders in a big game. There are too many sets of eyes.
Even if the referee doesn’t catch them on the day, the cameras will, and CCCC will fish for them later in the week.
Good forwards are better protected now, but predominantly in the inside forward line.
Out the field, it can be a pulling and dragging match.
Trash-talking can easily cross a line that is far worse.
Any man would still prefer someone to punch them in the nose than to whisper something about their sister or girlfriend.
Then there's the nipping, grabbing and reports of incidents that cross the line into full-blown assault, without an eye seeing it.
Nothing infuriates like knowing they’ll get away with it, or worse, you’ll lose the head, clock them and then they’ve won altogether.
Meath’s approach wasn’t to everyone’s taste but at least there was a form of manliness in it.
Not like the slabber in the ear or the manhood-squeezers.
You wouldn’t mind sending some of those boys back to ’96 to face their punishment.
