ROYAL RUMBLINGS

Meath and Dublin's storied rivalry might just be entering new era

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FOR maybe 15 years, a golden age during which it burned as intensely as a blood-red setting sun, Dublin v Meath offered the ultimate, unmissable Irish light show, sport as fiery, passionate summer kiss.

Roughly bookended by the late 1980s and the early years of the new Millennium (with 1991's livid roar at its epicentre), this ear-splitting, anarchic Beast from the East was a boisterously exploding firecracker, a rivalry with a hypnotic blue-green dazzle.

"It was electrifying. Pure aggression and adrenalin. Huge crowds. Big characters. Everything on the line. The fear stalked you for 70 minutes," is how Paul Curran, 1995 Texaco Footballer of the Year and arguably Dublin's outstanding talent of that uniquely competitive era, recalls those booming days of thunder.

"It felt like life and death. The only thing people talked about for weeks before and after," remembers Bernard Flynn, Meath's lyrical assassin, serial vaporiser of big city dreams.

When the teams collide in Portlaoise tomorrow, there will be perhaps 20,000 present and, with Dublin's ceding of national imperium coinciding with tentative Meath green shoots, a sense that if a Royal ambush remains a long-shot it is at least, for the first time in many years, not a physical impossibility.

Once upon a yesteryear these coming togethers oozed the transcendent fervour of a religious experience.

It was the mothership of the GAA Championship, the layer cake of an Irish summer.

It climbed to an hallucinogenic high in 1991 when over four games (at the end of which the aggregate score was Meath 6-44, Dublin 3-52, or 62 to 61) the two giants went toe-to-toe in an immortal livewire of human emotion.

Until a late, impossibly dramatic Kevin Foley goal followed immediately by a David Beggy point delivered Meath's final lethal sword-thrust, both teams, in their refusal to perish, resembled Spencer Hall's celebrated description of Istanbul.