Wexford will provide first test for McEnaney

Seamus McEnaney insists he's under no more pressure than any other inter-county manager as he starts his second year at the helm of the Meath football team. McEnaney will send his players out for their first competitive fixture of the year when they take on Wexford in the O'Byrne Cup at Pairc Tailteann on Sunday, 2.0. His debut season at the helm turned out to be a largely forgettable experience as his side struggled to find form in the league and the championship. Meath were fortunate to escape relegation from NFL Div 2 and were knocked out of both the Leinster SFC and the All-Ireland qualifiers by Kildare last summer. Royal County supporters will be hoping, and expecting, a whole lot better this time around with the spotlight firmly on the Monaghan man who has been charged with the task of improving Meath's standing in the world of Gaelic football. "I'm not under any more pressure than every other manager in the country," he insisted when he spoke to the Meath Chronicle. "When you manage an inter-county team it's a pressurised game, you don't go into it unless you're ready for the pressure that goes with the job. "Every manager in the country is under pressure to get results and get his team to perform, that's the nature of the game." The Meath players returned to training last night (Tuesday) wasting little time in getting some official collective training in before they take on the Wexford men. Despite the fact that this is 'only' the O'Byrne Cup, effectively a pre-season warm up, McEnaney insists that he will want his team to win. He is hoping to be in a position to put out a strong side to face a Wexford outfit who will once more be managed by Jason Ryan. McEnaney feels it's important to get his team into a winning mode from the word 'go' and continue in the manner. Start as you mean to go on could be his motto. "We go out and expect to win every match, O'Byrne Cup, challenge games, league, it doesn't make any difference, we want to win every one of them," he insisted. While it remains to be seen what 15 will line-out against Wexford, three players McEnaney will definitely be without are Nigel Crawford and Paddy O'Rourke who have opted out for 2012 while Shane O'Rourke is sidelined with a long-term injury. At least McEnaney is in a better position than he was at the start last year when he still had to familiarise himself with many of the players specifically and the football scene in Meath generally. While he would like to see the end of the winter ban on collective training he says it proved to be a much bigger stumbling block last year. "It's certainly disastrous for a manager who is in his first year, it's not so bad for a manager who is there and is in place and has seen the whole club championship. "We have had trials and a few games in October in the Fitzsimons Cup tournament, the ban is not so bad for us who had fitness programmes in place. "We could let the individuals do that programme, but if you're starting from scratch it's disastrous. "It's important for us that we've had O'Byrne Cup, league, championship, club championship games behind us, we've seen a lot of players in Meath in 2011." That may give Meath supporters hope that with a manager who knows his players and is settled in his role the team will start to produce the kind of displays needed to make them a force once more - starting against Wexford. Many Meath supporters will still have nightmares from Meath's last encounter with Wexford in the Leinster SFC in June 2009 when Ryan's men came back from a 0-4 to 2-8 deficit to win by 2-14 to 2-13. What Wexford team will turn out is anybody's guess at this stage although their selection could feature players such as Rory Quinlivan, Ben Brosnan, Redmond Barry and goalkeeper Anthony Masterson. This time McEnaney intends to work with what he terms a "tight" panel of 30 players from the start although he emphasises that it is a work in progress. He has come to dislike the concept of having 40 players or more in for training. In his view it is unwieldy and difficult to manage. In those circumstances it's impossible to give the personal attention to individual players that he feels is required. Determined that "nobody had slipped the net" McEnaney says he and his selectors looked at 100 players over the past year. Now he has a better idea of who he wants. Of course two of those selectors, Liam Harnan and Barry Callaghan, have since moved on having departed early last summer in a blaze of negative publicity. He will want to avoid a repeat of that kind of bad press coverage as he seeks to generate a feel-good factor around the panel. His message is that no-one can rest on their laurels. "That's the way we intend to keep the panel now, with 30 players, but throughout my management career we operated by having a revolving door policy, if a player is playing well outside the panel with his club than he'll get an opportunity and if there's a player not going well inside then he'll be out of the panel." McEnaney says he doesn't know if Crawford has retired from inter-county football or not, just that he won't be available this year and he was basing that on what he had read and heard. "Nigel has been a great servant of Meath football, but nobody knows better than Nigel himself," he added.