The making of a hurling legend Ð Sylvie Linnane

I’D never met Sylvie Linnane. Not at All Star awards nights in Dublin at the end of the year, or at the start of another year by some bluer-than-blue swimming pool or some tempting bar when the Meath and Galway teams repeatedly ended up elbow to elbow on our team holidays. I’d never even said hello to the man.

Which was a strange non-occurence, given the fact that Meath and Galway, and Sean Boylan and Cyril Farrell were destined to travel the one road together for years brimful of joy and disappointment.

We won back-to-back All-Ireland football titles in 1987 and ’88. Galway claimed Liam MacCarthy the same two years. And we both targetted the magical three in-a-row in 1989 but, by then, both Meath and Galway were two GAA teams with large multi-coloured targets on our own backs!

Meath were the ‘bad boys’ of Gaelic football. That same label did not firmly stick itself to Galway’s backside until early summer in 1989 when Tony Keady was struck down with a 12 months suspension and Cyril Farrell and his players made it known that they were in two minds whether to defend their precious All-Ireland title, or perhaps inform the association’s powers-that-be exactly where they could stick their championship.

Galway’s situation did not attract much sympathy across the country – apart, of course, from Meath football folk. We loved the natural toughness, and unaplologetic nature of the team Farrell had built, and the manner in Sylvie, Gerry McInerney, Brendan Lynskey, Joe Cooney and Co. outplayed and upended so many of the blue-blooded hurling counties filled us with delight.

Meath footballers liked very much having Galway hurlers as their partners at the association’s top table, and also as their partners in crime whenever the same association set up a court-room On our own training field, the shout ‘Give them timber ... Sylvie!’ was heard loud and clear in the long summer evenings as we sharpened up, and toughened ourselves up, for what lay ahead in the months of August and September.

Usually, the cry went up when one unfortunate Meath footballer had been pummelled into the hard ground by another Meath footballer. We loved Galway’s style. And everything else about the team, warts, indiscretions, hot-headedness, and blatant divilment!

For more, read this week's Connacht Tribune.