John Fogarty
A FEW weeks ago, Liam Harnan was asked at a funeral about how things were going in the Meath camp under manager Seamus McEnaney. He threw his eyes to heaven.
It appears Harnan and Callaghan, in throwing away their maor foirne bibs, had grown tired of being left out of the decision-making triumvirate of McEnaney, Grimley and McElkennon well before the manager gave Graham Geraghty a recall.
It appears they had grown sick of feeling they were token Meath men in a Meath management.
Given the existing and relatively successful working relationship McEnaney already had with Paul Grimley and Marty McElkennon at Monaghan, it was inevitable he was going to work with them more closely.
But to isolate the pair about Geraghty’s return in a county that is not his own was a grossly short-sighted decision and potentially a fatal one for him and his management team.
McEnaney has some form for making unilateral decisions. Electing to replace injured Monaghan goalkeeper Shane Duffy last year with full-back Darren Hughes and not substitute netminder Sean Gorman didn’t lose him a game but it went down like a lead balloon in his own county.
Gorman wasn’t informed of McEnaney’s selection until the morning of the Ulster SFC game with Armagh. He immediately left the panel – and would you blame him?
As it has already been commented in recent years, the Corduff man likes to take risks. The Hughes one worked but there are only so many times you can bet on black and black comes up.
That McEnaney also appears to be working with two panels with just two weeks to go before their Leinster opener against Kildare is a worrying one.
Admittedly, he was starting late but surely he knows his best 15 by now. Is the team really going to be different to the one that salvaged a draw against Tyrone in the last round of Division 2 to keep them up?
And doesn’t introducing 38-year-old Geraghty at this late juncture go against the forensic reassurances he gave concerning his management team’s expenses to copper-fasten his appointment?
Let’s call McEnaney’s decision for what it truly is – populist. Recalling Geraghty was always going to make headlines. It mightn’t have been McEnaney’s modus operandi but by inviting the 1999 All-Ireland winning captain to the panel he was going to endear himself to supporters.
To the players too. After Geraghty had got involved in a training bust-up with Stephen Sheppard in 2007, it was feared his team-mates would turn their back on him. They didn’t.
Although Geraghty was suspended by management for a game, he returned for the qualifier against Galway in Portlaoise. He came off the bench to inspire his team at a critical juncture to victory.
On the terraces, Graham was still the man. A banner was unfurled reading, “Geraghty back to Sheppard his flock”. Outside the dressing room afterwards, Geraghty was gleefully embraced by his colleagues.
There was no question McEnaney’s course of action was going to be backed by those two sets of groups but he completely forgot about his already disenchanted lieutenants Harnan and Callaghan and his kingmakers, the county board.
As Liam Hayes says in today’s Irish Examiner, “Whether McEnaney knows or understood the whole recent history of Meath I don't know.
“I would have thought he'd have given more time to consider bringing him into the squad.
"Bringing a 38-year-old into the squad is a risk in itself but in bringing in Graham Geraghty he seems to have offered his own head on a plate to the county board.”
Geraghty has upset plenty of Meath officials in his time but there’s the whole unwanted attention his reappearance has brought on the county.
No fault of McEnaney’s, the Royal County have been on damage limitation mode since the fall-out from last year’s Leinster final. They shot themselves in the foot in ditching Eamonn O’Brien for some unknown reason but the fact was they were already on tenterhooks without Geraghtygate Mark XXXVIII.
McEnaney is a gregarious character. He knows his football too but in becoming the first outside in the history of Meath football he couldn’t afford to put a foot wrong. His good friend Joe Kernan would have warned him about that after his unceremonious exit from Galway last year.
McEnaney teetered on a tightrope in managing to avoid Division 3 football on the last day but now he’s free-falling and there doesn’t appear to be a safety net.
His cavalier style is not in keeping with the mood among Meath officials right now. It’s alien to them, as much as he is in his origins.
Whether this episode is enough to finish his time with Meath is hard to say but that mightn’t matter. Meath clubs showed just how ruthless they can be when they axed O’Brien after he won a Leinster title last year, a season after he brought them to an All-Ireland semi-final.
If McEnaney now fails to emulate or better O’Brien’s 2010 achievements and they don’t punish him for failing to do so they will be regarded as unfit hypocrites.
They took a punt on him. Ironically, in taking a punt on Geraghty, McEnaney could fall on his own sword. Thems are the risks with risks.
Source: http://feeds.examiner.ie/~r/iesportsblog/~3/v5oRTtmmOL0/post.aspx
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