Simonstown's day of reckoning in Trim

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 last few weeks FERGAL LYNCH asked some of those national journalists to take time out from their hectic schedules to pen a few words recalling their favourite sporting memory.

Today we feature the Irish Independent's Colm Keys who looks back at Simonstown's remarkable victory over Dunboyne in 2016 and how that win was the key to achieving their crowning glory of the Keegan Cup.

COLM Keys is currently GAA correspondent with the 'Irish Independent. He was previously worked as a sportswriter with the 'Meath Chronicle' and the 'Irish Mirror' and is a member of and former player with Simonstown Gaels

LAST APRIL, in the urgent need to generate copy as the sporting world closed down, the 'Irish Independent' asked its sportswriters to recall their most memorable sporting moment.

I choose the 1996 Munster hurling semi-final between Limerick and Clare, decided by a miraculous Ciaran Carey point at the end of an extraordinarily intense contest.

Such a furnace was the Gaelic Grounds in Limerick on that June Sunday that the tar beneath the 40,000 or so spectators as they made their way in along the Ennis Road outside was melting. And it reflected the atmosphere inside.

In the losing dressing-room afterwards, the vanquished Clare manager Ger Loughnane described it as "the kind of game we hear about from our fathers and grandfathers."

Down the corridor the hero of the hour, Carey, puffed on a fag and graphically took his audience through that final mesmerising play, bending at the last second to throw off his pursuers at the end of a 50-metre dash after catching Davy Fitzgerald's puck-out. How times have changed.

I weighed heavily though as to whether I should document my real favourite sporting moment or occasion, Simonstown's win over Dunboyne in the 2016 Meath SFC quarter-final in Trim. In the end, readership dictated and I opted for Carey and his magic. Everything is relative.

This invitation from the 'Meath Chronicle' offers scope to recall that now for, in my view, heavily weighted and laden with bias as it is, it was the best senior club football match I have seen in this county.

I should qualify that I can only claim to have seen a very small percentage of games so my choice is limited and I'm sure others can offer better alternatives. But on that balmy early October evening it felt, to me, as primal and absorbing a contest as there had been.

Of course, opinion is shaped by the outcome. Simonstown won after extra-time. For context, the team had lost a Feis Cup final after extra-time to Donaghmore/Ashbourne a few weeks earlier relinquishing a commanding position, the latest in a long line of near misses that the club and its teams at senior level were becoming all too familiar and synonymous with over the years. It felt that night leaving Dunganny that the best chance of winning something might have slipped through the hands.

But instead of dragging the team down, they were emboldened by it and when Mickey Brennan nervelessly (what other way!!) converted a free to force extra-time, there was an overwhelming sense, chiefly among the players but also supporters, that momentum was with them and it was time to throw off the shackles of doubt and hesitancy and go for it. Which they did.

It featured some wonderful head-to-head battles, especially around midfield where old hands Shane O'Rourke and David Gallagher slugged it out and young guns Conor Nash and Ronan Jones, 18 and 19 years old respectively, quite literally ran each other into the ground. Late on Mark McCabe got the goal to seal.

For as long as I remember, going right back to underage days, Dunboyne teams have always been one of the great benchmarks for Simonstown, and Meath club football in general, and that evening it felt like a victory of real merit, that a weight had been lifted. And it was, as subsequent events proved. It may only have been a quarter-final but ultimately, that was the night the foundations for Simonstown's first senior title were laid.

It took some time to get out of the Trim car park that night but I don't recall ever been as calm and content to sit in a traffic jam!