Cracking Canavan point was one to savour for Keane
On the national scene Meath are very well represented with many high-profile and well-regarded journalists plying their trade in sport, politics and current affairs.
In a series of features over the next few weeks we have asked some of those national journalists to take time out from their hectic schedules to pen a few words recalling their favourite sporting memory.
This week we will feature Irish Daily Star Sports editor Brian Flanagan who will reflect on the 1996 All-Ireland SFC semi-final between Meath and Tyrone, and free-lancer Paul Keane who will recall his encounter with Tyrone's Peter Canavan after the 2005 All-Ireland SFC semi-final against Armargh.
PAUL KEANE (FREE-LANCER)
From Mooretown, Ratoath, Paul now lives in the hurling hot-bed of Kilmessan. He first started working in journalism in 1999 on a part-time basis for the Ireland on Sunday newspaper and has been a freelance sports reporter ever since, principally covering Gaelic Games for the national newspapers. Paul completed a BA in Journalism at Dublin City University in 2002 and has published two books, on soccer and golf, and contributed to The Boylan Years biography.
THERE'S A stack of GAA match programmes from the 2019 season in the office at home, around 75 of them, corresponding to about 90 games I covered that year.
That figure was well down for 2020 though it's generally been somewhere between 80 and 100 games a season picked up for various newspapers and online outlets for each of the last 20 years.
Some games fade from the memory quickly and it's often a magic moment away from the pitch, before or after a match, that you remember most.
Like as a kid, watching an adult woman reach out and touch Colm O'Rourke at one of the All-Ireland homecomings in Dunshaughlin, in 1987 or 1988, and screech, 'I touched his arm, I touched his arm'.
That was the reverence we all held that team and those players in and a few years later, myself, my Dad and my uncle, watched from the Canal End as O'Rourke climbed off his sickbed and almost pulled it out of the bag against Down in the '91 final.
Getting a little closer to the action since starting out as a freelance reporter in the summer of 1999 has brought more great memories.
Covering Colm Cooper's debut for Kerry - the 2002 Division 2 League final in Limerick when he scored a goal after four minutes - and chatting to him afterwards for perhaps his first interview as a Kerry player lodged in the memory bank. 15 years later, a couple of us collared him outside the dressing-room after Dr Crokes won the All-Ireland club title at Croke Park and he shed a couple of tears, his last game at Croker.
My favourite moment of all came a couple of minutes after the 2005 All-Ireland semi-final between Tyrone and Armagh.
They'd already met twice at Croke Park that summer in two Ulster finals and literally detested eachother, the high point of a rivalry for the ages.
With a few seconds left in the third game, it was 1-12 apiece and Stephen O'Neill was fouled for a Tyrone free about 21 metres out on the left, kicking into the Hill 16 End.
Owen Mulligan trotted out to take it but smiled and simply handed over the ball and the responsibility to Peter Canavan, his former schoolteacher and arguably Tyrone's greatest ever player. Canavan, sent off in the Ulster final replay, nailed the kick and the game was called from the resulting kick-out.
I'd gambled when he'd kicked the free and raced down to try to grab him for an interview. I got there just as he was running down the tunnel. I can't remember a word he said in the interview but I'll never forget his assassin's stare, and those eyes, burning with intensity and bulging out of his sweat covered head.
Living in Drogheda at the time, I crawled back up the M1 in a convoy of northern registered cars and felt a bit like the woman who'd touched Colm O'Rourke's arm and felt that pulse of electricity.