GOING by the 1991 Allstars selection, you could be forgiven for presuming that Meath won the All-Ireland that year.
They didn’t, of course, and the six Allstar awards that came their way, compared to just four for Sam Maguire Cup winners Down, caused a stir at the time.
A decade later, Meath suffered another final defeat, this time to Galway, and consoled themselves with four Allstar awards.
A full 22 years on from that 2001 season, Meath have only had one more Allstar winner – Stephen Bray.
The Royals can expect representation on this season’s Tailteann Cup Allstars selection, having blazed a trail to tomorrow’s final against old rivals Down.
Those awards won’t match what could be termed the ‘full Allstar’ that Bray won, however, following a terrific season in front of the posts in 2007. If you suggest to the current Meath selector that he might be secretly happy to hold onto his status for another season?
“No, no, I definitely would be happy to see that record go,” smiled Bray, agreeing that one Allstar award in 22 years is a poor return for a once mighty county.
“It is, it is of course. I suppose we have to be realistic too. Ultimately, you have to be competing at underage level and you have to be competing at schools level. That then brings you into U20 and senior.
“I think we have to be realistic as a county and say that, until we’re doing those things on a consistent basis, then we still have work to do.
“The challenge at the moment is that we have done reasonably well at U17 level, we’ve won a minor All-Ireland a couple of years ago, so the next step is trying to progress those lads on at U20 and as seniors.
“That’s still our challenge as a county. Then it’s just building that consistency.
“It’s about what happens within our own club environment as well, making sure that we’re as competitive as possible.”
Bray is cautiously optimistic about the path the current Meath seniors are on. A mid-season slump left the Royals without a win for seven games running, bottoming out with their Leinster SFC opening round loss to Offaly. Since then, they have won five games in-a-row. It’s a while since any Meath team has been able to boast a record like that.
“Yeah, but look, in the group we were in, we were playing Division Three and Four teams as well,” said Bray of the Tailteann Cup group that Meath topped, which included Tipperary, Wexford and Down.
“We had a good attitude towards the competition and treated everybody the same and analysed them properly and prepared well for each match and got the results that we deserved.”
Whatever way tomorrow goes, it’s been a summer of development for Meath and it was no surprise to hear manager Colm O’Rourke state earlier this week that he’d love the campaign to run for another three months.
They have used 25 different players across the Tailteann Cup campaign to date, a figure that rises to 29 if you include the defeat to Offaly.
A dozen different players have been handed their Championship debuts, many of whom are former Leinster minor medal winners from between 2018 and 2021.
As much as some Meath supporters cursed their bad luck for slipping into the Tailteann Cup, it could just prove a blessing in disguise, allowing for such an overhaul to take place in a less pressurised environment.
“Possibly, yeah,” nodded Navan O’Mahony’s man Bray.
