By John Harrington

To fully appreciate how far the Meath Ladies Football team have come in a relatively short period of time, it’s worthwhile going back to the 2015 All-Ireland SFC Qualifer against Cork.

They were humiliated in front of a live TG4 audience that day, eventually losing by 7-22 to 0-3.

Meath subsequently requested relegation to the Intermediate grade after the 2016 Championship, and though that might have seemed like a backward step at the time, it was the beginning of a journey in the right direction again.

The appointment of Eamonn Murray for the 2017 campaign was key. He’d worked at the coal-face of underage ladies football in the county for many years, and no-one was better equipped to turn youthful potential into something more substantial in the senior grade.

The only problem for Meath Chairman, Fearghal Harney, was that Murray didn’t want the job, and in the end it took five phone-calls to persuade him to take it.

As Murray recalls now, the reason he eventually agreed to accept the challenge was because Meath Ladies Football was in such a bad place, and he wanted to put smiles on faces again.

His first mission was to persuade the best players in the county to don the jersey again, which was no easy task.

“You’ve no idea what I had to do,” says Murray. “I had to beg players to play for Meath. I’d have promised them everything under the sun. I asked them, a lot of them, ‘Give me two weeks starting off and we’ll see what happens.’ But a lot of them had no intentions of ever playing senior football again. It wasn’t easy now, it was a tough job.

“We were one kick of the ball away from Division 4, it was that bad. But we always knew the talent was there. I won the All-Ireland U-16s (in 2009). There’s only four of that team training now, which is wrong. We can never allow that to happen again.”

Meath initially made steady rather than spectacular progress under Murray, reaching the All-Ireland Intermediate semi-final in 2018 and the Finals in ’18 and ’19 before eventually winning the second tier championship last December.

They also rose through the League rankings, going from Division 3 to Division 1 in that same period.

Despite that consistent progression, Murray doesn’t mind admitting that reaching the All-Ireland Senior Final in their first year back in the top grade has been a pleasant surprise.

“I could never really see it happening this far on,” he says. “I’d be mad to say if I did. I never dreamt in my wildest dreams we’d be playing in an All-Ireland final. I thought we would at some stage, but I wouldn’t be involved at the time, I thought.

“After the (2020) All-Ireland (Intermediate) final we were hoping we’d stay in Division 2 and not be relegated from senior, so this is really a bonus for us. We’re really enjoying it. We took one step at a time, then Covid came along and they actually came back to us in April in a lot better shape than we had left them at Christmas, so we knew that something special happened then.

“We were stunned by their strength when they came back, they were way better than they were when winning the All-Ireland (intermediate). So, we said we’d try to win a few games, but we never really talked about All-Irelands, far from it.”

The manner in which they’ve reached Sunday’s All-Ireland Final against reigning champions Dublin has made it an even more remarkable achievement.

Very much the underdogs going into the semi-final against Cork, it looked like the match was playing out along expected lines when they trailed by seven points with less than five minutes remaining.

But then the Royals scored two dramatic goals in the final minute when they threw caution to the wind and pushed high up the pitch, forcing extra-time and eventually wining the game by two points.

“We were able to shout that in,” says Murray of the tactical switch-up that saw them turn the All-Ireland semi-final on its head. “There was no real big crowd there compared to the next day.

“We only had a few thousand there after Offaly and Roscommon left, so they could hear us.

“We had a plan if we were down a few points to throw Vicky and Emma Duggan into the full forward line and throw in a few high balls.

“A lot of friends of mine and family members of the team had left to go off and have a cup of tea, or go for a walk. They wouldn’t watch it.

“So, it’s real exciting not just for ladies in Meath. I am around a lot around Meath in houses. I am a tiling contractor so I am in houses where there are plumbers and there’s people, all around Longford and Leitrim, and they all see it and they all love it.

“We have done a lot for ladies football I think, not just in Meath. I am getting phone calls from Limerick and from all over the country saying how enjoyable it is this year, how different.”

It’s hard to believe any of this would have happened had Murray not gone against his own instincts by agreeing to take charge of the team in 2017, but he’s the sort of person who prefers to spread the credit around rather than take it all of himself.

“You get the right coaches involved,” he says. “We've a brilliant backroom team there, we get on very well. Everyone knows their job and if everyone knows their job, like, that goes down to the liaison officer, to the county board chairman, like, we have a defensive coach, a forwards coach, a head coach, goalkeeper coach and they're all doing their job.

“If one of them doesn't do their job right, we're going no place. They all know that. There has never been a row yet and hopefully one won't start. I wouldn't have asked them in if I didn't trust them.

“They do the entire coaching, we stick a team together, any changes we all do together, I don't take control. I don't do that. They're the lads that know the players better than me. So I'm blessed to have them all.”

As for the players themselves, Murray could wax lyrical about them all day long. He’s coached most of them up through the grades since they were teenagers, and the bonds that tie them together now couldn’t be stronger.

“”They are all great people," he says.

“I have four girls of my own at home so I am well used to looking after girls and what to say to them, and the right thing to say to them, and how to get on with them.

“I get on with them, I treat them like my own family. That’s the way it always was. That’s why they really want to play for me, you know.”

“It means an awful lot to me. I learn a lot from my own girls (Murray has four daughters).

“But they are friends with the team. I hear things coming back, how I can improve. Maybe I said something wrong to one of them, you know.”

Murray was in a very relaxed frame of mind when he spoke to the media this week ahead of Sunday’s All-Ireland Final, which is perhaps understandable.

No-one is giving them a chance against a Dublin team gunning for their fifth All-Ireland title in a row, so they are unburdened by expectation.

“I presume they’ll be the hottest favourites of all time,” says Murray. “We’ll not get nervous…we don’t really do nerves, we just go out there and enjoy it. And we’ll not get too upset if we lose.

“We’ll give everything we have. We ask the players, if they give it all they have, we’ll be there or thereabouts. But it will take a huge effort, and we all know just how good Dublin are. But we’re really looking forward to it. Nothing to lose at all; I mean nothing to lose. It’s all a bonus for us.”

Will these relatively inexperienced Meath players be able to mentally rise to an occasion of this magnitude? What if the dramatic All-Ireland semi-final win over Cork was in fact their All-Ireland Final?

Murray is non-plussed by that leading question.

“If it was, sure we’d had a good day out.”