Favourites tag can weigh heavy

This week ANTHONY MOYLES warns against the pitfalls of complacency in the first of a two-part column that looks back at the 2008 championship and the hopes and expectations that were in the Meath camp after a promising run the previous year which brought Colm Coyle's side to the All-Ireland SFC semi-final

The Leinster Football Championship is due to start in less than two weeks time with three games scheduled for the weekend of the 16th/17th May.
Meath will face Wicklow in Navan on Sunday 14th June, a full four weeks after Offaly play Longford in the first of the Leinster championship games.
Depending on the outcome of that first game, Meath are either in a very enviable or unlucky position this year as they and Wicklow will be the last two counties in Leinster to play any championship football with three teams having had two outings prior to their game.
The problem with getting a pass in the first round is that you can potentially meet a team facing into their third championship game. They could have already ironed out a number of issues that may have cropped up during the first two games. It is potentially a very dangerous game.
As a player, one of the things I looked for when the draw was made for the Leinster Championship was when will we face “the Dubs?”
Notwithstanding the fact that we often had to face other teams on the journey to play Dublin this was the game that every Meath player wanted.
You were guaranteed that everything would be ratcheted up for this contest. The old saying that “Meath will not fear the Dubs” would come to the fore and indeed every player would understand the size of the task facing him and the history attached to it. It was always a massive contest.
Sometimes this worked against us. I remember on a few occasions playing some first or second round Leinster championship games against supposedly lesser opposition and being way below par.
In a few of those games we arrived as massive favourites and were often in a lose-lose situation. Win easy and everyone would expect it. Lose or just scrape a win and everyone, especially the begrudgers, would say we were useless and a disgrace to the jersey.
They were very difficult matches to prepare for. The management had an especially difficult job in trying to keep players focused on the job in hand rather than thinking of the next step, especially if that step was playing Dublin.
Quite often players’ minds would drift and talk would be of “when we win” rather than “how we win”.
To be fair, we very rarely got caught in one of these situations although we came very close on a few occasions.
There was one game in particular in which we did get caught. It was 2008 when we played Wexford in the second round of the championship.
We had just completed a very encouraging 2007 campaign, reaching the All Ireland semi-final where we met a rampant Cork side. To finish as we did was disappointing, especially from a personal perspective as I was captain and could not play due to an injury, but the journey was massively encouraging.
We had some tough battles along the way beating Down, Fermanagh, Roscommon and Tyrone, but had emerged as a far stronger team. So the 2008 championship was certainly being looked upon as another potential avenue for improvement.
We knew that if we won three games in Leinster we would more than likely be in a final against Dublin. We had played two great games against Dublin the year before with them only pulling away with about five minutes to go in the replayed game.
We felt we owed them big time and confidence was high that if we met them again, we would atone for what happened the previous year.
The campaign started pretty well with a massive win over Carlow. Again, this was one of those games that we were massive favourites and were practically unbackable.
It was a potentially tricky outing as we had had a pretty poor league campaign with a lot of injuries, but confidence was high as intensity was really ratcheting up both in training and challenge matches coming into the game.
The spirit was good and players were chomping at the bit. We hammered Carlow by 20 points. I had undergone a groin operation earlier in the year and was battling back to full fitness. I watched as the team grew stronger by the week and I feared I would not make it back into the panel, never mind the team.
Up next was Wexford, one of our bogey teams of recent league and championship campaigns.
We arrived in Carlow on a glorious evening. An expectant Meath crowd filled the stands and feelings were high that we would proceed to the next round against Wicklow or Laois in a Leinster semi-final.
The game started and we absolutely tore into Wexford. They could not live with us. We played some unbelievable football. I remember warming up with Brian Farrell with about 15 minutes to go in the first-half and remarking to him that there was no point warming up as everyone was playing so well and there would be no need for substitutes.
We could have scored about four or five goals in that first-half. We were absolutely rampant. Half-time came and a relieved Wexford found themselves 10 points adrift and it could have easily been 20.
My feelings walking into that dressing room were that we had started 2008 championship in great shape and we would be one step close to that Leinster final outing. But then things changed!