Published: Wednesday, 13th January, 2010 4:59pm

Weather conditions hinder preparations

by Fergal Lynch

Meath senior football manager Eamonn O'Brien discussing the experimental rules with referee Pat McEneaney before the challenge games against Louth two weeks ago.
Pic by==: 97

After four months of inactivity following the end of Meath's All-Ireland SFC run in August and the ban on collective training for November and December, plans for an assault on the 2010 league and championship have been further hindered by the dreadful freezing weather of the last few weeks.

Since the resumption training as an inter-county panel Meath's preparations have been hampered with frozen pitches and heavy snow falls restricting the number of sessions and the venues for training.

After a couple of trial matches in December and gatherings of small groups of players for individual training programmes, manager Eamonn O'Brien only got to get his hands on the panel from Friday, 1st January. A training match which involved up to 40 players was held on New Year's Day before the SF challenge against Louth on Sunday, 3rd January.

That game in Haggardstown didn't exactly go according to plan for the manager, his new coach Sean Kelly or their fellow selectors Donal Curtis and Robbie O'Malley and in all honesty the game shouldn't have went ahead at all such was the terrible condition of the frozen pitch at the Blackrock, Louth venue.

Plans to iron out some of the problems that arose in the 3-4 to 2-14 defeat by the Wee county were discarded by the freakishly abnormal snow storms the county and country endured last week and O'Brien was forced to do much of his work with the players that were able to negotiate the hazardous travel conditions.

"It has been a difficult few weeks for us because of the weather. We have been able to do a bit of work with some local lads around Navan, but because the travelling conditions were so bad a lot of lads weren't able to make it to some sessions, I didn't ask them to travel in such terrible conditions," O'Brien told the Meath Chronicle.

"We didn't get to do anything on Thursday night at all. We got a bit of training in last Tuesday and we also had a session at the weekend, but it was all indoor work. We got St Patrick's CS, Navan pitch the other day, but it was covered with snow so we could do very little.

"It is a big setback because we haven't done much training at all. We were late starting the gym programme because the championship was so late finishing and then the collective ban for November and December put a halt to any plans for training as a panel.

"All the lads have been able to do is a bit of training in the gym on their own. It is a concern ahead of the O'Byrne Cup and NFL campaign. We needed the last couple of weeks to do some hard training, but now there is a temptation to overdo it and that could only make things worse.

"We have to be mindful now that we don't try to cover everything too quickly. We will keep our options open when it comes to going to the sun for some intensive training, I don't want to rule anything out at this stage," said the manager.

Looking ahead to the Longford game in the O'Byrne Cup on Sunday, O'Brien is confident that the game will go ahead and after a stuttering few weeks he is hopeful that the players will get another much-needed game under their belts before the start of the league campaign.

"The game against Louth was the first time a lot of those lads had played together, so hopefully for the game against Longford we will have a better mix.

"We are still working with the same lads so we have close to 40 lads in training and we will hope to get another look at them over the next two weeks," concluded O'Brien.

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