By John Harrington

Timing can be everything in sport and whether Meath win or lose Saturday’s Tailteann Cup Final against Down, their experience of playing in the competition this year looks very serendipitous.

In his first season as manager Colm O’Rourke has blooded a generation of new players and emboldened them to play an expansive brand of football.

There were some tough days at the office during the League and in the Leinster championship against Offaly, but the Tailteann Cup then provided an opportunity for those young players to grow and O’Rourke’s game-plan to bed in.

So whatever the result against Down on Saturday, Meath’s experience of playing in the Tailteann Cup this year should have laid a solid foundation on which they can build in 2024.

“It's been brilliant for us because we have had a run of games and we've been able to introduce lots of new players and we end up in the final which was the object of the exercise at the start,” says O’Rourke.

“Obviously, there's a huge bonus in winning it that you get automatically into the Sam Maguire next year but I'm not really looking at it from that point of view.

“I think it's worth winning in itself and I hope that by next year we're better in the League because I think these players are going to get better with another year's experience and that we will qualify for the Sam Maguire on merit through the League without worrying about winning the Tailteann Cup or otherwise.”

During this year's League Meath struggled to find the right balance between defence and attack and O’Rourke’s ambition to play an expansive brand of kick-passing football was derided as naïve by some.

But even when his team suffered some heavy defeats he never felt under pressure to abandon his principles.

“Not really because the reality checks that we had were down to a lot of innocence in terms of both the experience and the confidence of the players involved,” he says.

“I was fairly happy that we were going the right way except that these players needed time and more and more games, that's what the Tailteann Cup has given us.

"They have definitely improved significantly, the five or six lads that are going to start on Saturday have improved a lot since the first day that they played against Tipperary.

“I don't think anybody should think that they know more about it than anyone else. As far as I'm concerned we should copy Dublin and Kerry and basically the same way as they play, I don't see why not, they are the two most successful teams.

“We obviously defensively got caught a lot during the League but we have tried and tried and worked hard and hard on that but if you have three or four new players in your backline, you're going to struggle to cement it as a group.

“But we're getting there and things are working better. We weren't being naive in the beginning and thinking that we were going to play a rollercoaster like game where we were going to all pour forward, it wasn't like that.

“It's just that it's taken quite a while for our defensive structure to cement in but it is getting better. We do want to play a fairly fast-moving kicking game if at all possible but it doesn't always work like that. If there's 15 men behind the ball, we're not going to be kicking it in high and hoping for the best.

“We weren't great on turnovers during the League. We were poor on that, which showed we weren't tackling well. We have improved on that. We weren't great on opposition kick-outs during the League, we would hope to have improved on that. They're the fundamentals.

“When I look at the way DUblin went after the Mayo kick-out in the second half of the game here and their tackling in the middle third of the pitch, rather than let Mayo get the ball and come at them. That's the sort of game that we would like to play.”

Meath football has gone through an extended fallow period for the best part of 20 years now, but O’Rourke has high hopes the Royals will soon be dining at the top table again because the game is getting stronger at all levels in the county.

“There's a massive interest in it at all levels,” he says. “Like, I was involved in club football for the last 20 years with Simonstown. Every club, every village, every place has a team.

“There's very little competition (from other sports), there's great pride in the thing. We hit a 10-year cycle where things seemed to go wrong and there didn't seem to be the talent that we had previously.

“We were spoiled for a while. But I think it's going to come back. I saw it in school too, we had a bad cycle there for a decade. I don't know what it was. Despite the fact that we worked harder at it than ever before, we just didn't seem to be as successful as we were in the noughties. I think it's been like that with Meath.

“I think the wheel has turned. I hope that when we get back close to the top again that we're able to maintain it for a longer period of time. Meath has a population now of 220,000 and hasn't much in the way of opposition from other sports.

“It (Gaelic football) is a very heavy invested sport in every locality and I'm hoping that we will build a structure in Meath that will sustain us at a reasonably high level. And we have to look after our underage...our clubs have not been competitive and the biggest single thing I think that helps with a county senior team is the U-20 team and we haven't won one of those in over 20 years in Leinster, an U-20 or an U-21.

“A Meath team hasn't won a Leinster club championship for nearly 20 years. So the things that should build your county team we have been quite weak on.”