IN 1996, MEATH and Mayo battled in an All-Ireland final and replay which became infamous in GAA history, and ended with more men suspended that any other game before it. Here, in his just published autobiography, Royal Blood, Meath’s three-times All-Ireland winner and the county’s only representative on the GAA’s football Team of the Millennium, recalls the battle of all battles in Croke Park.
WE WERE FOUR points down with 10 minutes to go in the first game, and we couldn’t get going at all. It was a fairly breezy day. Mayo started better and went a couple of points up. We really struggled to get our game going and we were 0-7 to 0-4 down at half-time. Ten minutes into the second-half, a long ball came into our full-back line.
Darren Fay and Paddy Reynolds both went for it and got in each other’s way. Next thing the ball broke, and Ray Dempsey came in and side-footed it past Conor Martin. So that was us six points down and playing terribly. I thought that was it. Mayo would only score one more point after that though, and we chipped away.
One point, then another, then another.
We had pulled it back to a single point with time almost up. Then came the famous score from Colm Coyle which levelled things up.
Coyler got it around the middle of the field, beside that coloured patch they started putting on the pitch for All-Irelands. He drove in what could only be described as a Hail Mary ball. That was the only thing for it at that stage – put it in there and hope for a lucky break. Somehow Mark O’Reilly – who was a corner-back – was up there and he almost got his hand to it and put it in the net. It could have gone anywhere. It managed to miss everyone in the goalmouth and bounced clean over the bar.
The final whistle went soon after. We got out of jail. It was a really poor showing that day and we never clicked at all. We had no rhythm to our game. The best thing about it was the way we came back after going six down. Brendan Reilly got a couple of great points, Trevor Giles kicked his frees, John McDermott got one – then there was that last score from Colm which saved us.
It was hard to know why we played so badly. After playing so well three or four weeks earlier, then to have this performance – it was hard to explain. Training had gone well, everyone was in good form, and there were no injuries, nothing. Maybe, deep down, lads thought that they were going to win comfortably. Every dog on the street was telling us that we were going to win.
When people are saying that – and they mean well – it can get into your head, and it’s very hard to get it out. Also, it must be said that Mayo were an awful lot better than we thought. They were a strong outfit and were very unlucky. It was a terrible Meath performance though, and Mayo could have been out of sight had they not kicked so many wides.
After the drawn game, there was a huge sense of anti-climax. We went back to the hotel, headed home the next day, and then we were back training on the Tuesday. Believe you me, it takes a while to pick things up after a game like that. That first week back training, things were at an all-time low. It was torture training and trying to build ourselves back up again, because we thought we were done with it the week before. We had put so much effort in, then all of a sudden we’re back training.
Everybody was really flat. There were obviously no celebrations the night of the drawn game, so everything was back to normal very quickly. It was a huge come-down and it took us a week to really get going again.
THAT WAS IN total contrast to the night of 1988 drawn final, when we had a great time. Both games were very similar in that we didn’t play well, and got out of jail right at the end. For some strange reason though, there was a totally different feel around the ’96 draw, I’m not sure why.
It might have been down to the high of beating Tyrone and maybe thinking that we should beat Mayo. It might have been that in 1988 we knew we were going to have it tough against Cork and we were glad to get a second chance, whereas in ’96 we might have been overconfident and we were brought back down to earth with a bang. After the game, there wasn’t that much said.
We knew that we’d got away with one, so it was back to the drawing board and back to training to try and make sure we put in a better performance the second day. We had a chat on the Monday morning about what went wrong and what we needed to do better. It took about two or three training sessions to get that game out of our system and focus on the next day.
We wore those Donegal colours in the replay as I call them and, six minutes in, all hell broke loose. The conditions that day were probably the worst I had ever played in. I don’t mind it being wet and a bit breezy, but this was a gale-force wind, the sun was shining, and there was feck all rain.
The wind was horrible. It was blowing straight down into Hill 16 at the time. Early in the game, Maurice Sheridan had a free from under the Cusack Stand. It wasn’t really kickable for a right-footer, and it dropped short into the goal-mouth. I had it in my hands for a second before John McDermott took it.
He was coming out with it, and Anthony Finnerty came in and hit McDermott a little slap in the face. I came in and pushed Finnerty out of the way and then…chaos!
People will say to me, ‘You hit nobody’ or ‘You hit this fella’.
Actually, I hit nobody, and nobody hit me.
At first I was running around trying to stop lads fighting, because there were only one or two at it, initially. Then all of a sudden there were four or five lads involved, then very quickly there were 20 lads at it.
I was fed up running around trying to stop fights, because what would surely have happened is I’d get a box myself, and I’d end up in the middle of it. The handiest way out for me was to go up to the umpire, who was Francie McMahon. Francie was a driver for Manor Farm chickens, and I used to meet him on the road regularly.
So I said to Francie, ‘What’s going to happen here?’
‘Colm Coyle and Liam McHale are going to be sent off,’ he told me.
How those two were going to be picked out, I don’t know. That’s what Francie said, Lord have mercy on him, and he was right. I was chatting to him for a couple of minutes and there wasn’t a chicken or a ham mentioned!
‘How can you pick those two?’ I asked him.
I mean, lads were milling each other, but I didn’t realise it was so bad until I saw it on the television. It took a while to calm down, but I don’t think there were too many decent boxes thrown, though Colm threw a few, I’d say!
So, Pat McEnaney came in to chat to Francie and I walked away. Pat came out, sent the two boys off, and that was it. I know he said many years later in an interview that he was going to send off McHale and John McDermott until he spoke to Francie, who had spotted Coyler ‘dropping six of them’. So that’s what happened.
WHY THERE WAS a melee, I don’t know.
Maybe we were overhyped, or we wanted to prove a point? It’s hard to say. There had never been any niggle between ourselves and Mayo in any of our previous meetings. This was much worse than what happened between ourselves and Cork, even though there was a lot of bad blood between us back in 1987 and ’88.
A lot of people were saying that we lost our worst player and Mayo lost their best. I don’t go along with that for a second. Coyler was a huge loss to us. I thought he had been excellent that year. He played well in the drawn game and he added a bit of steel to our defence. On top of that, he had two younger lads with him in the half-back line, and now he was gone.
I was left on my own with a lot of inexperienced lads around me. So Colm was a big loss not just for his football ability, but also for his experience and his talking on the field. Mind you, those young lads came of age that day.
The game settled down after the row, but shortly after that I was backing up to catch a ball, and I pulled something in my hip. My God, it was sore, but I battled on. I wasn’t going to give in, but I was black and blue that night. I did okay in that game, though the conditions were terrible for both sides and it was a really difficult wind to play into. I picked up one of the few bookings I can remember getting in my career later in the half. I caught a ball under the Cusack Stand and passed it over Maurice Sheridan’s head. He body-checked me slightly, and I pushed him back. The ref booked the two of us.
I had been marking Ray Dempsey early on, but he was taken off about 10 minutes before half-time. PJ Loftus came in, who was a bit of a speed merchant. He wasn’t long on the field when a high ball came in between Mark O’Reilly and Anthony Finnerty. I could see it was going to break either left or right, so I went one way, but the ball went the other.
I was within touching distance of Loftus, and I could have pulled him down, but I knew that if I did I’d be sent off. He stuck it in the top corner with a great finish. That put Mayo six points up with half-time approaching. Again though, we were able to hit back straight away, which was a real trait of the Meath teams I played on.
We got a penalty after a long ball was played into the Mayo square and Tommy was dragged down. Trevor stepped up and stuck it away, so the Mayo goal was cancelled out almost immediately. That probably knocked the stuffing out of them a small bit. If they had tagged on one or two points after getting their goal, it could have been curtains for us. As it was, we went in just four points behind, which wasn’t too bad given the wind Mayo had in the first half.
They struggled a bit for scores after half-time because of the gale that was there. James Horan took a shot at one stage and I was right behind him. It was going straight over the bar, and the wind just took it and it dropped short. At the other end, Trevor floated over a few great points that the wind helped carry over. You could just put the ball up and the wind would nearly do the rest.
In spite of having the elements behind us, we were still behind by two points with around 10 minutes to go. That was when Tommy Dowd played a captain’s part and popped up with a vital goal. Graham won a free, which would have been one that Trevor would have knocked over at his ease. I’d say the Mayo defence were thinking the same, and they dropped their guard for a split second.
Graham took it quickly to Tommy, who was unmarked around the 21 yard line. Tommy rounded the goalkeeper, fell on the ground, and how he got his leg to it to kick it I don’t know – but he rolled it into the net.
It was a dour game, and we were lucky to win by one thanks to Brendan Reilly’s famous point down at the Hill 16 end. He turned his man, took a touch, and stuck it over from an impossible angle. He didn’t drill it, he just curled it and the wind took it in.
Mayo came back at us again right at the end – down the Hogan Stand side. Someone got a half-block on a shot and the ball broke to me. I got around my man and I drove it as far as I could. Then I heard the final whistle. We hadn’t played well at all. Were we lucky to win it? We probably were a little. Mayo actually played better against the wind than we did, they carried the ball a little bit better even though the winning point came from Colm McManamon carrying the ball into trouble and getting dispossessed.
I REALLY VALUED that one, and took everything in.
I didn’t go too mad ,and relished every minute. We were back in The Davenport Hotel after the game and met everyone there. I would say I enjoyed that one more than the other two. People sometimes ask me did it make up for losing in 1990 and ’91?
It doesn’t. Nothing makes up for losing an All-Ireland final, because you can’t get them back, no matter how many more you win. I was lucky enough to go on and win that third medal, as was Coyler. Other lads weren’t so lucky. It wasn’t a classic, and we certainly didn’t play the way we did against Tyrone, but that game was played on a perfect day for football and we were well up for it.
The two games against Mayo were really dogged, desperate games. The replay especially was a desperate spectacle for a final, not helped by the conditions. It felt to me like the two teams brought the worst out of one another.
I wouldn’t have been as close to the lads on the 1996 team as I would be with the 1987-88 team, but there was a strong bond there – we saw that when they went on and won another All-Ireland in 1999. It was different for me in ’96 because I was the older lad in among a lot of young lads. I was coming to the end, and I’d spent so much time with the previous team, whereas the young lads wouldn’t have spent much time with the old guard at all.
A few like Tommy, Trevor, McDermott, McGuinness and some others would have, but the lads who had only just come in in 1996 wouldn’t have. So I wouldn’t have spent as much time with a lot of those lads as I would have with Mick, Gerry Mc and Colm. It was only natural that you’d feel closer to lads who you spent more time with. But the bond was still great. You don’t win All-Irelands unless you have that, no matter what age you are.
I suppose the fact that a lot of lads joined in the melee showed we were a tight-knit bunch! Why it kicked off, I really don’t know. To this day I’m puzzled by it. It made us look bad, because there was all the controversy with me over the incident in the Tyrone game. Then a month later, Meath are involved in another skirmish and everyone seemed to hate us. It was a pity, because I don’t think any team deserves that.
But those two incidents so near to one another – it didn’t do the county or the team any good. We had no choice but to take it in our stride and get on with it.
The next day, when the dust settled – or so we thought – both teams were brought back to Croke Park for a function. You could cut the tension with a knife. There were two buses leaving our hotel – the team bus and the supporters’ bus. Sean had tickets for the function to hand out to the team. But between one thing and another, some of the team went on the supporters’ bus, and some of the supporters went on the team bus, so everything was mixed up.
The first bus went about five minutes before the second. I was with Tommy Dowd and Colm Coyle on the second bus, and Tommy had the Sam Maguire Cup. The first bus landed at Croke Park and everybody went in. Then we arrived, and there were stewards and Croke Park blazers outside, and we couldn’t get in. The lads in the green jackets wouldn’t let us in because we had no tickets, and we had no tickets because Sean was gone in with all of them! He was above looking down on us.
We had the Sam Maguire Cup, and the Meath blazers on, and yet we couldn’t get in.
We couldn’t get in for love nor money.
Eventually Sean got word as to what was going on, so he came down and handed out the tickets, and in we went.
There was a bit of friction between players from both teams, and words were said.. The President of the GAA got up to say a few words and Sean said a few words. Next, it was John Maughan’s turn. He never congratulated us properly, I felt. He spoke about how great the Mayo team was – which you would expect – then at the very end he just said, ‘Well done Meath’.
That didn’t go down too well. There was a bad atmosphere across that whole function, and it raised its head at different times. I saw a few of the Mayo lads at the All Stars do a few months later, but there was no talk with them or Tyrone. I don’t know if they didn’t want to talk to us or we didn’t want to talk to them, or both! There seemed to be a real hatred there, worse than what we had with Cork, I would say. I haven’t seen any of the Mayo lads since, but I’m sure if I was over there and I bumped into McHale, he’d chat to me and we’d have the craic.
Jack Boothman was the GAA president at the time, and he just brushed it off during his speech at that function. He was very diplomatic about it, he didn’t really make any issue of things. He mentioned that the brawl was something that shouldn’t have happened, but he passed over it and moved on, which was in total contrast to what happened with John Dowling in 1988.
After the 1996 final, a lot of suspensions were handed out. Jimmy McGuinness got the longest suspension – six months. You would think someone was after being killed. I thought the whole thing was blown out of proportion. Jimmy was highlighted on The Sunday Game, and Pat Spillane mentioned that he was like Michael Flatley. Jimmy got involved early in the row, and by the time it finished I think he was nearly under the Cusack Stand. He wasn’t going for a walk either, he hit everything going! Maybe six months wasn’t that outrageous now that I think of it!
We got a lot of bad publicity after 1988 and ’96, but it didn’t bother us. The more bad press we got, the more motivated we were. I really think a lot of teams who came after us modelled themselves on those Meath sides.
’Royal Blood: The Martin O’Connell Autobiography is published by Hero Books (www.herobooks.digital) and is available in all good bookshops. It is also available as a printed book on Amazon (€20.00) and as an ebook on Amazon, Apple, and all good digital channels (€9.99).’
