O’Rourke keen to accentuate the positives despite heavy defeat

It's never an easy thing to have to face burning questions after a 16-point drubbing, but Meath managers are becoming accustomed to it in recent years and last Sunday was Colm O'Rourke's turn to feel the pain.

It must be hard for a man who soldiered on so many great teams that put Dublin to the sword so often to have to explain away another heavy loss for his side.

When O'Rourke took over as manager from Andy McEntee just a year and a half ago he set out his main target - to be competitive with Dublin. However last Sunday he admitted that the gap still has not closed, but he firmly believes his players are heading in the right direction

"There's loads of positives. I thought the first 20-25 minutes we played quite well and we got some nice scores and defended very well in that period of time," O'Rourke told the assembled media after making his way round from the Cusack Stand dressing rooms to the Hogan Stand Media Centre.

"There were a lot of lads who played quite well and for lads so inexperienced, I think there were six of them playing their second or third Leinster championship match, they played quite well.

"You can't buy the experience of playing in Croke Park. We've all had days like today. The fellas that are with me, Stephen (Bray), Trevor (Giles) and Barry Callaghan, we all had days like that in Croke Park and the test for us is just to come back from it.

"I said in the preview before the game that Dublin had players that had more All-Ireland medals than we had fellas who played in the Leinster Championship.

"That's why they're All-Ireland champions. In my time playing football, I'd say that James McCarthy, Brian Fenton, Ciaran Kilkenny and Con O'Callaghan are probably better players than anyone I have ever seen here. We have to take that into account.

"They set a bar for us to try and get to. We have a young squad. Within a couple of years, I would hope that we'd have the physique and the fitness, which only comes with time to match a lot of the Dublin players.

"We can take a lot of positives from the first half. Again, I thought it was of an improvement on a lot of our National League performances. Last Sunday we improved, but that was against Div 4 opposition (Longford) and today we came up against the very best.

"It shows the vast gulf that there is between teams and it reflects our own position if we are to be brutally honest with it.

"We are a second division team and we have a long way to go."

The promising first-half performance O'Rourke referenced saw Meath trail by just five points at the break, but Dublin upped the tempo after the break and as Meath tired they took advantage of mistakes.

"They pushed up a line of four in the full-forward line and a line of four in the half-forward line and a line of four behind them and took their chances that if it went over that line, that we wouldn't do them the sort of damage that Derry did to them," said the Meath manager.

"Of course, they completely hemmed us in and we were left with a long kick-out option to Cian McBride, that was about all that we were left with. I wouldn't fault Billy Hogan on that. It was a systems failure all over the pitch."

Meath now have a five week wait before the All-Ireland series begins and they will have to wait until after the provincial finals to know just who they will face in those Sam Maguire groups.

O'Rourke knows exactly who he doesn't want to face in the group series, but whoever it will be he will have to plan without the services of the injured Shane Walsh.

"Very unfortunate for Shane, just a very simple thing on Wednesday night, broke a bone in his foot. Puts him out maybe for eight or 10 weeks," O'Rourke told the press.

"For a fella who has worked so hard to get back after a serious operation on his hamstring last year it's really a bad blow personally for him as well as for the team, but most importantly for his own self after putting in such a huge effort to get himself back in shape.

"There's no doubt that the response will be positive. They are an ambitious group, they want to get to that level. It was a stark reality check for them to see how far they have to go. Just in case anyone was losing the run of themselves we haven't closed the gap on Dublin at all, but these players are ambitious and they are willing to work hard.

"As I keep saying a lot of them are very young and lacking experience I still think we will get a lot better over the next year and I think we will even be better by the time the Sam Maguire comes around. I just hope we are not drawn with Dublin again.

"There's no quick fix for Meath football. It's not as if we have been dominating. At under 20 or 21 level we haven't been in a final in 20-something years or a senior club final for 20 years, so it's not as if we have this vast pool of highly qualified winners out there that we can just draft into the team.

"We've set ourselves on a course of action on a team that we knew was not going to be competitive in the short term, but in the belief that within two to five years that this group will form the backbone of the Meath team for a continuous period of time and they will be a lot better.

"Today was a fairly sharp reminder of what football at the very very top level is and we have to get bigger, stronger, faster, fitter, cuter all of those things, but we'll go away and work on it."

With another drubbing at the hands of Dublin the value of the provincial championships were once again called into question and O'Rourke called for them to be moved in the calendar.

"That's not Dublin's fault, it's the fault of teams like Meath who haven't been competitive for a long, long time but to me anyway, the obvious thing is the Leinster Championship should be played before the league," advised the manager.

"It's absolutely ridiculous that teams in the league are waiting, waiting, waiting and don't know what competition they're going to be playing in or when they will be playing.

"If the provincial championships were over everybody would know exactly what they have to do before they start the league, particularly those teams in the second and third divisions what they had to do to ensure that they were playing in the Sam Maguire. It's very unsatisfactory in the present system."

Despite the pain of losing to the auld enemy O'Rourke was fulsome of his praise of Dublin and admitted his admiration for them. He also wasn't prepared to criticise the decision to allow Sean Bugler's opening goal stand after the Dublin player had clearly exceeded his quota of steps before firing the ball to the net.

"No, no, absolutely not. We had given the ball away further up the field and I suppose it's a sign of a good team, they got the ball back and they punished us.

“I think we gave away 1-5 from turnovers in the first half when we were competitive, so that was killing us.

"I admire Dublin I think they have helped save Gaelic football from the negativity of other teams. I have nothing but the highest admiration for them, I just wish we could beat them occasionally," lamented the Meath boss.