Brothers in Sport (10 page)

They agree that the demands on inter-county hurlers today are excessive, and Joe is not convinced that the heavy workload now being placed on young shoulders is improving the game. ‘If you look back on some of the games of the 1990s they were every bit as good as games today. The game was just as fast then and there was a lot of skill. There is too much emphasis on weights today.’ However, he is enjoying the challenge of team management. Offaly have slipped from the highs of the 1990s and he is anxious that he plays his part in helping them to once again challenge Kilkenny, Tipperary, Galway and Cork at the highest level.

For the moment, Johnny is concentrating on coaching the young boys in Tullamore and takes a keen interest in the game generally. He has strong views about the modern trend of county panels taking action against team managements. ‘This management thing is gone a bit ridiculous. I get tired of reading day after day about disputes between players and managements. Players need a bit of a reality check and to start looking at themselves. It can’t be the fault of the manager all the time. The whole manager thing is over-emphasised. His job is to direct operations. It is up to the players themselves to make sure that they are putting in the effort, making the commitment and performing on the field. When you are a player you must realise that you are only there for a short time and you just put your head down and get on with it. Sometimes a manager might not be the best, but as a player you know, or you should know, what needs to be done. Players need to take responsibility for themselves.’

He looks back on his time with Offaly with great fondness. ‘I had thirteen or fourteen really good years. I played with and against some great players. Every year we togged out we knew we had a chance of winning something, that we were competitive and we could put ourselves in a position where we could win a Leinster or All-Ireland title. We were able to enjoy ourselves but we also knew how to work hard. You look back not just at winning All-Irelands or Leinster Championships, but the team holidays we had, the All Stars tours. There was no financial gain for us but there were other things to enjoy. I wouldn’t change a thing.’

He is a great admirer of Kilkenny manager Brian
Cody and his ability to keep a group of players performing to such a high level over such a long period. ‘It’s not easy to maintain that sort of dedication and to keep your feet on the ground. A player can get carried away with himself and not realise he is just passing through. Things might go well for one year but you must never forget you’re only a short distance away from the bottom of the pile.
Cody has done a brilliant job keeping this group going at such a high level.’

Billy decided to move back to junior hurling this year. There were twelve under-21 players on the Seir Kieran senior team with him in 2009. His own three sons are showing a keen interest in the game. Another generation of Dooleys is ready to serve Offaly hurling.

A study in concentration: Mick Lyons keeps his eye on the ball in the 1987 All-Ireland final.
© Ray McManus/SPORTSFILE

Just seven kilometres north of the rattle and hum of the M4 motorway lies an oasis of peace and tranquillity. Rathcore Golf Club has a natural beauty set among the drumlins of Meath that provides an escape from the pressures of everyday life for golfers from all over the Irish midlands and the eastern seaboard. There is a good chance that on a visit at any time of the year some familiar faces from the world of GAA past and present can be spotted, drawn to the course by its strong connection with football.

It is a bright spring morning when Mick Lyons strides purposefully into the clubhouse, the powerful gait unchanged from the days when he ruled Croke Park. There might be a few flecks of silver in the hair but this man has carried the years better than most. The big smile is as warm and engaging as ever, the handshake firm and welcoming. This is his lair now. For the last eight years Mick and his cousin Austin have created this course, far from the hustle and bustle of the football cauldrons Mick occupied for a decade and a half spanning the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s.

From the day he put away his boots as a footballer with Summerhill and Meath, Mick dreamed of mixing his enduring love of sport with his business life. Rathcore is the result. These are not the easiest times for business or golf, but the majesty of the place which is apparent when you drive through the gates and up the sweeping drive towards the first tee, allied to the determination of the man, suggests they will ride out the storm.

Mick endured many stormy days in an immaculate career with Meath during the glory years of the 1980s. More often than not he had an able lieutenant alongside him, his younger brother Pádraig. They survived the hard days together when the Meath football team existed in a nether world, far from the land of silver and gold. And when Meath rediscovered their pride and place among the giants of the game, the Lyons brothers were central to the rejuvenation. They played together for their country as well and tamed the Australians in International Rules football.

Proudly Mick recalls that on one occasion around 1985, when Meath was emerging from football obscurity, the full back line was made up of the three Lyons brothers, Pádraig, Mick and Terry. For three seasons between 1984 and 1986 Terry was on the margins of the team, always waiting for the breakthrough but never quite managing to make it. His glory days would be with Summerhill.

The Lyons boys, and their sisters Mary and Brenda, were brought up in the parish of Oldtown, near Summerhill, on the border with Kildare where Paddy and Mairéad Lyons had set up their home. Paddy, with Mayo blood coursing through his veins, loved football and played with Kilcock, making the Kildare senior team. ‘In those days,’ explains Mick, ‘Kilcock was the major centre of activity. People shopped there, went to church there and many of the people went to school there. My father played for Kilcock, but he also played for Summerhill and there was a time he played for Cappagh.’

The boys’ football destiny was decided when they were sent to Coole National School in the parish of Summerhill. Their schooling coincided with the emergence of a very talented Summerhill group of players who would go on and have a major influence within the county and would produce a number of very talented players for Meath. Mattie
Kerrigan, a member of Meath’s All-Ireland-winning team in 1967, was a major figure in the club and would have a huge influence on the footballing careers of the Lyons brothers. Mick’s secondary schooling brought him to Trim, but he was a fully fledged Summerhill player by then.

Football was their first love but they played other sports when the mood, or the influence of television, struck them. The front garden of their home was the playground, where boys from all around gathered to play whatever the chosen sport of the day might have been. ‘That’s where you learned to look after yourself,’ remembers Mick. ‘It was a good training ground for the years ahead.’

Mick was attracting notice from an early stage. He was Summerhill’s Young Player of the Year in 1974 and the following year played corner back on the club’s junior team that won the Meath Championship. A year later he had joined the senior team alongside his cousin Austin, Mattie
Kerrigan and the Gibbons brothers, John and Tom. They won two County Championships and the Leinster Championship in 1977, although Mick’s participation was interrupted by injury.

By 1979 the Meath selectors decided it was time to elevate the youngster from Summerhill to their senior team. He started at centre half back. ‘I was definitely the worst number six ever,’ he laughs. But the Meath experience was hardly uplifting. He had come from a club scene where standards were exceptionally high to a county environment that was almost chaotic. ‘The truth is that Summerhill was far better equipped than the county team. Training was more organised, more professional. There would always be twenty or more players at training. When you went training with Meath only about six or seven players might turn up. We trained under lights with the club. There were no lights for the county team. I had to fight harder for my place with Summerhill than I did with Meath.’

Midfield was his position with the club and he loved it. Though he would become a household name as a full back and is regarded as one of the best ever in the position, Mick always enjoyed midfield more. ‘Full back was grand but it doesn’t have the freedom of midfield. Out there the ball was around you all the time and if you were any good in the air you really got involved in the game.’ He even played at full forward for Meath in 1981.

Not that anyone took much notice of positions or of what was happening with the Meath team at the time. A general apathy prevailed. Games were played in front of a few hundred souls. There were no great expectations and they slipped way down the rankings in Leinster. Although the county did produce a number of talented players, there was no one around to mould them into a competitive unit. There was a stagnancy about the Meath county scene that smothered the ambitions of the players. ‘If you told anyone at the time that you were playing for Meath they laughed at you,’ Mick remembers.

‘I spent more time messing about than training with Meath,
’
he admits now.
‘It just wasn’t taken seriously by enough of the players or the officials. Our training was poor. Everyone could beat us.’ Wexford beat them in the 1981 Championship. The county chairman, Brian Smyth, embarked on a search for a new team manager to replace Mick O’Brien. He faced rejection at every door. ‘No one wanted the job and you couldn’t blame them,’ says Mick. ‘We knew
Seán Boylan all right but we didn’t expect him to get the job. We were surprised when he did get it. We were lucky too. We would never have done anything if it wasn’t for
Seán Boylan,’ he adds forcefully.

‘I have no doubt that if things had remained the same in Meath a lot of us would have been gone the following year. Myself, Joe [
Cassells], Gerry [
McEntee] and Colm [
O’Rourke] had been around for a few years and we hadn’t won anything and there didn’t seem to be any prospect of us winning anything. We wouldn’t have kept at it because there was no point. Seán changed all that.’

One of the first things
Seán Boylan did when he became Meath manager was to remove Mick Lyons from the squad! ‘Yes, he dropped me,’ Mick says with a smile. ‘He was right too. I wasn’t really training. I was doing more socialising than anything else. Seán had to change the way of thinking around the Meath team and anyone who wasn’t working hard enough would have to go. The first thing Seán had to do was put a bit of organisation into the squad, make the players disciplined. Getting rid of me was part of that.’

Very quickly Mick learned his lesson. Less than two months later he was recalled to the squad and played at midfield in a League game against Galway. It brought an eventful year to an end for the Lyons family. Pádraig had not played minor football for Meath but enjoyed three years with the under-21s and had been impressive during the 1981 Championship. Promotion to the senior team followed in the autumn. It was the start of an eventful period in their lives that would involve exotic travel to the far side of the world and to the summit of Championship football.

Boylan not only had to change structures, he had to put them in place for the first time. He also had to change the mindset of a county and that was going to take time. When Meath lost to Longford in the first round of the Championship on 16 May 1982, the knives were out.
Boylan survived because there was still no one prepared to take on a team that seemingly could not win. But Mick and Pádraig Lyons had played Championship football together for the first time that day. Things could only get better.

‘For the first couple of years Seán was putting an organisation together and changing the way we approached our football and how we thought about it,’ explains Mick. ‘Some were small things but they were important. After training we used to go our own way. There might have been a sandwich, half rotten, available under the stand in Navan, but that was about it. We just rushed home to get fed.’

Early in his tenure,
Boylan organised post-training meals in Bellinter House, where training sessions were also held on the twelve acres owned by the religious order, the Sisters of Sion. Not only was the standard of fare welcomed by the players, but the gatherings allowed the development of a team spirit. ‘Before that players went their separate ways. You didn’t really get to know one another and that wasn’t much good when putting a team together for the Championship.

‘With
Seán we would have a hard training session and then sit down together for a chat. Views would be exchanged. We would talk to each other about what happened in matches or in training. We would talk about how we could do things better. We talked about the opposition and everyone had an opinion. It was all part of the preparation we needed.’

Gradually they began to gel as a group.
Boylan intensified the training sessions. The hill of Tara became a punishing ground, the beaches at Bettystown were a form of purgatory, even hell, for players unused to such physical exertions. Mick remembers playing a game against Dublin when Meath competed well for twenty minutes. ‘Then they obliterated us. We were not fit enough at all.
Seán knew then what he had to do and the hard work really started. But he also drilled into us that if we could get properly prepared in a physical sense, that we had the football in us to compete. And if we could beat Dublin then we had a chance of winning the All-Ireland. Once we realised that and he had everything organised for us, then we really wanted to train and we were prepared to hurt.’

The message was getting through. Pádraig remembers long runs through the land undertaken by himself and Mick during the winter months before training under
Boylan resumed. ‘It was a great help to have a bit of fitness in the bank before we went back to
Seán,’ Pádraig says. In the 1983 Leinster semi-final Dublin and Meath drew and Dublin won the replay by a point after extra time. They went on to win the All-Ireland title. A year later the two teams met in the provincial final. The new Meath was gaining momentum. Then Mick Lyons suffered a broken hand in a club game and missed the Leinster final. Dublin won. No one could have foretold that Mick Lyons and Meath would not lose a Championship game again to Dublin until the last year of the decade, when Mick was again an absentee through injury.

‘There was something else about Seán that was important,’ says Mick. ‘He had a group of about twenty-eight players. There were all sorts of different characters. You have some very strong personalities and lads who weren’t afraid to express an opinion. You had Gerry [
McEntee], Colm [
O’Rourke] and Liam [
Hayes] who would all have been strong personalities. It wasn’t easy to manage a group like that. I wouldn’t have liked the job but Seán was very comfortable. He kept it going.

‘I was one of the quieter lads in the dressing-room. I didn’t want to have to say too much. But
Seán would always be at me to express an opinion. He didn’t want anyone to be shy. He wanted lads like me to be stronger within the squad. There were plenty of rows, but
Seán was happy with that. A row is a good thing because it shows that people care. He never let it get out of the dressing-room. Everything was between us.’

The road to glory would hit a rocky patch in 1985 when Meath were heavily defeated by Laois.
Boylan had to survive a vote at County Board level and changes had to be made in the squad. Bob
O’Malley and
Bernard Flynn were becoming permanent figures, but newer players began to emerge, in-cluding
Liam Harnan, a cousin of Pádraig and Mick.
Terry Ferguson also made the breakthrough along with
Kevin Foley and David
Beggy. The players were buying into
Boylan’s plan and by June 1986 they were ready. They beat Carlow and Wicklow on the way to the Leinster final and the start of a massive rivalry with Dublin. On 27 July, Meath became Leinster champions, beating the Dubs by 0–9 to 0–7 with Mick Lyons wearing number three and Pádraig Lyons wearing number four. They celebrated mightily in Summerhill that night.