Ciaran Caulfield happy to rack up the games and the wins with Meath

​By Paul Keane

By now, you might imagine that Ciaran Caulfield would have his All-Ireland winner's medal with Meath safely tucked away.

The Royal County have already defeated Kerry, Dublin and Galway in this season's Championship after all. The last county to do that, Offaly in 1982, won the All-Ireland that year. Throw in Meath's defeat of Cork, as well as Offaly themselves in Leinster, and Carlow, and you get a sense for just what a remarkable few months it really has been.

And yet there are still two more intimidating hurdles to surmount before they can get their hands on Sam again. Meath will need to defeat Donegal on Sunday for starters, and then Kerry or Tyrone in the final.

They could have easily packed it in and simply gone through the motions after losing the Leinster final to Louth, figuring it wasn't going to be their year.

"That was probably a hard defeat to get over but the way the structure is now, you actually don't have much time to dwell on games so you're back into training on the Tuesday and you just go back at it again," said Caulfield.

"It was nearly a good thing that the game was two weeks later, you look to kind of prep for it again, go again and just get back into that kind of next competition really. Obviously you take the learnings from it and move forward as well and I think we've done that quite well."

Since that loss to Louth, Meath have beaten Cork, drawn with Roscommon, beaten Kerry and beaten Galway. Wins over Division 1 teams before this season had been as rare as hen's teeth.

Caulfield himself has been a big part of the breakthrough season that the team has enjoyed. As things stand, he is in conversation for an All-Star award. Meath hasn't won an All-Star since Stephen Bray picked one up way back in 2007. Caulfield was only three at the time.

He has been one of Robbie Brennan's most durable and reliable performers, starting all 15 of Meath's Allianz League and Championship games this season. Throw in the six Sigerson Cup games he started for DCU, whom he captained to the third level title, and that's 21 competitive games in what is now week 28 of the GAA's master fixtures calendar.

He's the vice-captain of Meath too, adding a little extra weight and responsibility, so surely Caulfield is feeling the fatigue?

"I'd say the right answer would be that I'm nice and young and it's grand," smiled the trainee school teacher. "But it does start to probably...you might just pick up one or two little niggles as the season goes on but in fairness the lads are great with the set up.

"They keep monitoring whatever you're doing. Even throughout college and during the league when there were two games in a week, they made sure that you weren't doing too much in between with training.

"But you needed to be doing enough as well so that when it gets to this time of the year, you've kept up a certain fitness base that you're not going to be getting too many niggles."

Looking back, Caulfield reckons the week's break afforded to Meath for winning their group in the All-Ireland SFC series was a big help. They looked fresher and more energised last time out than Galway, who'd played a preliminary quarter-final.

"Physically, it wasn't really a break, you were still training and still probably doing just as much as you would any other week but probably mentally it was a break," he said. "Even just a week's break, mentally, was good."

Caulfield played the last time that Meath met Donegal, in the 2024 league. Donegal won that game by eight points and didn't have Michael Murphy back then either.

"You hear all the things people are saying about him, his leadership skills, it's hard to disagree with any of it," said Caulfield. "Obviously what he has done on the pitch for Donegal, he's an icon really. He's a massive player for them and someone we're going to have to look at trying to negate."

That job will probably go to Sean Rafferty, Meath's new full-back who has been compared to the great Darren Fay, a Trim clubmate of Caulfield's.

"Raff's flying, in fairness to him," said Caulfield. "Once he got his hands on that jersey, he hasn't looked back. He just seems to be coming up with big plays every game. It's nice having a full-back behind you like that. You don't have to worry about giving him too much cover.

"He's fit to mark any of the big players, as he's done this year. I think he relishes the challenge as well."

Meath will count it as a positive year regardless of Sunday's result though Caulfield backed away from that sort of mindset.

"I think the belief that we have this year is huge," he said. "It might have been easy to just play Galway, go up and put in a nice performance, be happy with that, but that's not how we were thinking. It was next ball, get up the pitch, try to get the next score. That's the mentality."