by Donal Keenan
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 Davi
d 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.
‘One of the things we needed to learn at the time was how to win big matches,’ Mick offers. ‘All the successful teams know how to close out a game once they get on top. It comes with experience. We hadn’t won big games for so long that we didn’t have that knowledge.’ He recounts one very painful experience to illustrate the step Meath needed to take. It happened during the All-Ireland semi-final against the reigning All-Ireland champions, Kerry. The ball had been driven in high from the middle of the field to the edge of the Meath square. ‘It was the sort of ball I would go for instinctively. But this time Joe [Cassells] and Mickey [McQuillan, the goalkeeper] decided to go for it too. We crashed into each other and ended up in a heap on the ground. All I remember is being at the bottom of the pile and looking up and seeing Ger Power with the ball in his hands and no one near him. He just tapped it into the net. I was thinking “how the hell is he not down here in the middle of this pile and not up there looking at us eejits?” You wouldn’t have minded getting hurt so much if you had taken him with you. That was Kerry. And we had to learn that when we got in control of a game we had to kill it. A year later we knew how to do it.’
By the end of a very eventful 1986 Meath had learned some very valuable lessons and were ready to move on to a new level. They were Leinster champions for the first time since 1970; Summerhill won the Meath Championship with Mick, Pádraig as captain and Terry in the team, along with their cousin John. And Mick and Pádraig were selected on the Ireland squad to make a historic first visit to Australia.
* * *
Anything Mick and Pádraig Lyons would have known about the St Colmcille’s GAA club in the east of Meath, and bordering Dublin and Louth, would have been learned from their soulmate in the Meath full back line of the 1980s, Bobby O’Malley. To this day they are probably unaware that it was an initiative from that club which propelled them to an experience both rate as one of the most memorable of their sporting careers – the first ever visit by an Ireland team to Australia in October 1986 for the second series of international test matches under compromise rules against the biggest stars of the Australian Rules version of football.
The club proposed to the GAA’s annual congress in 1982 that the GAA should examine the possibility of forging a relationship with the Australian Rules Football Association (AFL) ‘in order to establish an international series’. The proposal was passed unanimously and a five-man committee chaired by Gerry Fagan (Armagh) and including Dan Hanley (Dublin Colleges), Jimmy Deenihan (Kerry), John Moloney (Tipperary) and Pat O’Neill (Meath) was formed. A year later an invitation was issued to the AFL to send a team to Ireland in 1984 for the first series of games under negotiated rules.
No one knew quite what to expect when the semi-professional Australians lined out against Ireland for the first time in Páirc Uí Chaoimh in Cork on 21 October 1984. Mick Lyons was named at full back for Ireland and was already known as a footballer who could look after himself. But no one had reckoned on a massive Australian called Mark Lee. In just one example of the incidents which marred the opening game, Lee made a high challenge on Lyons and ended the Meath man’s participation in the game. ‘I don’t remember a lot about it. What I do remember is waking up in the dressing-room and the roof was spinning above me.’
The Australians won that test and a major talking point was whether or not Mick would line out in the second test the following Sunday in Croke Park. ‘There was never any question about it,’ he recalls. ‘I couldn’t let that incident affect me. I had to go out and prove something to the Australians and to myself. I had to put things right.’ He produced an outstanding display, his high fielding earning him plaudits all over the country and contributing to his status as a national hero.
When Kevin Heffernan was assembling his squad for the return tour in 1986 one of the first players named in his squad was Mick Lyons. Soon after, Pádraig earned his selection. Assembling at Dublin airport in October 1986 for the flight to Perth, the Lyons brothers were joined by their father, Paddy, for the historic month-long tour that would take in Perth, Melbourne, Adelaide and Sydney.
‘The day I heard that Kevin Heffernan had picked me on the squad for Australia was one of the best of my life,’ admits Pádraig. ‘I regarded then and still do Kevin as one of the greatest managers of them all and for him to recognise me as a footballer was a great honour for me. I didn’t really expect it at the time and that made it all the better.’ There would be drama before departure. Pádraig picked up an injury in the county final and had to pass a medical before travelling. He got the go-ahead, but the injury limited his involvement on the tour.
‘It was a massive thing for all of us,’ says Mick. ‘Growing up you dreamed of playing for your club and you hoped that you would get the chance to play for your county. But you were conditioned that you could not play for your country because there was no outlet. Here was the opportunity that we never expected and it meant an awful lot. To have the chance to go to Australia just added to it. It gave us some idea what it was like to play sport full-time and I loved it.
‘Any sportsman will tell you he would love to have a chance to play full-time. For four weeks in Australia we did nothing but train, rest and play, and it was fantastic. To be able to get up in the morning and go out and do something you loved, to be looked after the way we were and to play big matches was just pure pleasure. In that four weeks we were so much fitter just because all we were concentrating on was our football.’
They loved the company of other players – Jack O’Shea, Mick Holden, Joe McNally, Brian McGilligan, Greg Blaney, Damien O’Hagan and Pat O’Byrne among them. There were others with whom Mick and Pádraig would become very familiar in the years to come, including the Cork pair Jimmy Kerrigan and John O’Driscoll. ‘For four weeks we had the lifestyle of professional sportsmen and I will always treasure that,’ Mick adds. It opened his eyes to new forms of preparation and to how players should be treated.
‘We can never have a professional game here because the country couldn’t afford it. But that doesn’t mean that players shouldn’t be treated properly. Seán Boylan changed all that in Meath back in the 1980s, but too many County Boards were slow to move with the times. Players were being asked to give more and more of their time but they were getting nothing back. They weren’t getting proper meals or gear or anything like that.
‘Players should get jobs; if they can be provided with a car and all that sort of thing, then great. The problem with professionalism is the impact it would have on the clubs. The clubs need money all the time. It gets harder and harder to keep going, especially with all the teams that every club is running now. A professional game would soak up a lot of that money and that would be disastrous for the club. The club is where the player starts. Without the club, you would not have the player to play for the county. The club is already paying the price for putting out a county player because that player is as good as gone from the club for the best part of ten years and those are the best years of his playing life. He comes back to the club then with the best taken out of him.’
Despite further outbreaks of violence in Perth and Melbourne, Ireland proved too strong for the Australians in the three-test series. Victory was secured on a stormy night in Adelaide when Ireland won by fifty-five points to thirty-two. Mick also played for Ireland in the 1987 series. He is, however, worried about the future relationship between the two sports. ‘The differences between the two games are just too much. When they catch a high ball, they retreat from it. In Gaelic we don’t. It’s hard to adapt when you only play every couple of years. And there is a cultural difference. They’re professionals, they don’
t respect amateurism. It’s not bad manners, it’s just the natural order. And they could not afford to let amateurs beat them and that is why there were some of the problems every time the teams met. I know the crowds are great all the time here, but you wonder if it is doing anything now for football. Back then we did learn a lot from the way they trained and organised themselves and parts of their game have influenced ours. But I don’t know if there is much more to be gained from it.’
With his brother Mick on his left flank, Pádraig Lyons collects the Meath senior championship trophy on behalf of the Summerhill club from County Chairman Fintan Ginnity. © John Quirke Photography
* * *
Mick Lyons had new responsibilities when he returned to training with Meath for 1987. The quiet, almost shy, lad who liked to keep to himself in the corner of the room was appointed captain of the Meath team. The honour fell his way because Summerhill were the reigning county champions. The manager was happy because he knew Lyons had grown into a leader and the captaincy would help him express himself more in the dressing-room. ‘To be honest I would rather not have been captain. But it was a big thing for the club and I was glad of that. But the reality is that it didn’t affect me all that much because we had so many leaders in the dressing-room. And on the big days I had plenty to keep me busy. Marking lads like Christy Ryan or Dave Barry you didn’t have much time to be worrying about making speeches.’
He would have to make a few speeches during that year, the two most important from the steps of the Hogan Stand as Meath retained the Leinster title and then beat Cork in the All-Ireland final to secure their first All-Ireland title since the team of 1967 that contained so many of the heroes of the Lyons brothers’ childhoods. Mick not only provided leadership, but produced one of the most memorable moments of the year with a full-stretch block on a shot by Jimmy Kerrigan that prevented an almost certain goal in the All-Ireland final. Cork were four points ahead at the time. ‘I knew a goal would make it very difficult for us. I watched Jimmy coming through and I knew he wouldn’t try to go around me that he would shoot. I just had to time it right. Luckily it worked out.’ The next score was a Meath goal by Colm O’Rourke. Meath ended up comfortable winners, 1–14 to 0–11.
