On his first big day, the rain pelted down on Croke Park. The crowd were soggy and anxious. Cian Ward turned the greasy ball over in his hands, standing in the shadow of the Cusack Stand, 13 metres from the endline. The game was nearly over. The Dublin players were gathered around their own goal. The noise rolled around the curve of the stadium. The air around the Canal End, though, was still. Nothing was cluttering his mind. Others might have fretted over the kick. They might have felt the ball getting heavy in their hands and the slippery ground beneath their feet. The catcalls from the crowd might have invaded their thinking. For Ward, though, this was the best part of the dream.
When he was five years old in 1991 he got lost coming out of one of the epic draws against Dublin, but he had been there so often he already knew his way back to the car through the tangles of streets that snake around Croke Park. Here he was now looking the Dubs in the eye. In control. When he picked his shot, there was no choice. No doubt.
Back then, the Dubs didn’t know who the kid was. Twenty minutes earlier he had trotted on as a substitute. Moments later, Joe Sheridan tossed the ball in his direction to kick a 45. He picked his spot and watched the kick sail over. He kicked three more after that to rising acclaim, as Meath reeled in Dublin like a thrashing marlin. Now, the game was his to decide.
He kicked the ball low. It curled around towards the goalposts, and glided over. At the other end Mossy Quinn had hit two frees for Dublin and missed four others. Quinn had known some great days as Dublin’s freetaker, but too many bad ones too. This time, his anxiety was contrasted sharply with Ward’s effortless confidence. Once again, Meath had picked at Dublin’s nerves like a banjo.
He says: “It was all I was waiting for. My whole life since I was 10 was leading to this Meath-Dublin game in Croke Park. This was all I ever wanted to play in, just to see what it’s like.”
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The week before the replay wailed past him like a freight train. As Meath reordered their team, he pushed hard for inclusion. He felt good in himself, but the noise around him was deafening. “It was a pretty weird week. I didn’t really understand what the fuss was. Sometimes you just seem to be in the eye of the storm, but you don’t go looking for it. It’s probably not necessary either. But I desperately wanted to start.”
He wasn’t named on the starting team, but parachuted in that day. Dublin set their minds to handling him and starved him of the ball. By half-time, he was gone. “I learned lessons from that. I never got involved. I just couldn’t get my hands on the ball. As an inside forward if you can’t get ball you’re at nothing. It was very a disappointing day for me, and the team.”
He returned to the bench after that as Meath made an All-Ireland semi-final. It hurt, but never threatened to break him. One evening years before, he sat watching a county junior championship match against Nobber with his father Philip. His club, Wolfe Tones, had a penalty in the dying moments. The teams were level. His father reckoned the point was the best option. Ward said it had to be a goal. Percentage shots were nothing. Win it.
Wolfe Tones took the point. Nobber pulled back the point and won in injury-time. It firmed up the lesson in his head. Football was about winning, not surviving.
It’s what made him a freetaker. When he was young, he could kick like a mule. In time he honed that power with accuracy. When they practiced frees at home in Kilberry, a free was never considered a good one unless it dropped down from the sky onto the back of the net, like a stone plopping into a lake. That was the aesthetic flourish Ward aspired to. Confidence made it possible to achieve. Freetaking wasn’t pressure. It could be beauty.
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“It’s just something I’ve always done. It’s not something I’ve ever had to think about a whole lot. Some lads are made into a freetaker. From that point of view they might work more on technique. For me it’s having the confidence in my own ability and how I do things. Obviously it doesn’t work sometimes and you go back to the drawing board. But it’s not something I’d ever consciously have to work on.
“I’ve thought about it before and always concluded I’d rather kick the free. If you have a crucial kick and you watch someone else miss it, you’d be thinking, ‘I could’ve done better’. You’d rather be in control of that.” Meath have trusted him since 2007, and seen him grow. On his best days, only Bryan Sheehan with Kerry can come near him as a freetaker. As a ballwinner and an attacking threat, Meath are close to getting the best from him. Ward has grown up with a generation of gifted forwards but often seen their returns struggle to match their potential. When they play with their clubs, each player is always the sweetest voice in the group. Sometimes they struggled to see themselves as anything else with Meath. Now, they’re starting to fit together in harmony.
“Sometimes that (individualism) held us back. There’s huge scoring potential in the Meath forward line. You’d have eight or nine forwards that would certainly be unhappy if they weren’t on any county team. It’s about finding the right balance. At the minute the six forwards have been getting scores. Each player has a completely different skill set and brings different things to the team. Maybe that’s why things have gone so well.”
Finding that balance has taken time. In 2008 Meath ripped Wexford asunder in Leinster and led by 10 points at half-time. Ward told the team he reckoned they needed maybe four points to get safe. Meath managed four points, but Wexford scored goals. Ward watched the last 10 minutes from the bench as the game slipped away. A few weeks later Limerick had bundled Meath out of the qualifiers. The damage was deep and far-reaching.
“Maybe we rested on our laurels a bit in 2008. We don’t think there was a bad attitude. Sometimes when things start going wrong, it’s very hard to rectify it. Eamonn [O’Brien] came in last year and part of it was rebuilding lads’ confidence. The defeat to Wexford was very hard to take and probably still left scars into last season. After we lost to Dublin last year, though, we were disgusted with ourselves. We wanted to prove we were worth more than that. We really went out with a whimper. It was a strange game. There was no atmosphere at all. The two games in 2007, they were what we’d consider proper Meath-Dublin games.”
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All the little dents to their confidence gradually rose doubts among them. “Lads probably wondered where they stood. From a personal point of view, fellas didn’t know. They started to doubt their own ability. When you have 10 or 12 lads in the same boat, it’s very hard to lift things. But Eamonn and the lads did brilliantly last year to galvanise things and get everyone together. Everyone was going through the same thing. We were able to get out and get on with it together.”
In the middle of that uncertainty, Ward’s form was something they clung to. He started every match last season along with Eoghan Harrington. By the time Meath reached the All-Ireland semi-final against Kerry, Ward was top scorer, 10 points ahead of his nearest team-mate. Against Kerry, though, he sensed something he had seen with his club.
When Ward was a teenager, Wolfe Tones had started dragging themselves up from junior level. At 17, Ward had hit 2-5 in a county junior final. They pulled themselves through intermediate level the following year and took just two seasons at senior to win their first county title. Over the years they had figured out the unspoken secrets of winning. They won matches when they were outclassed. They crushed teams when the chance arose and survived in tight spots. If Wolfe Tones had learned these secrets, Kerry created them.
“You can believe you’re going to win a game, but there’s a difference in knowing you’re going to win a game. Kerry, because of what they’d achieved, just knew they could win that game. We’d never done it. When you haven’t done something, you can have all the belief in the world but not the knowledge to do it. Knowing how to (win), is often more important than believing you can.”
They seek that wisdom now. Losing to Dublin sickened them last year. Losing to Kerry confirmed the gap they needed to bridge. Finding a way is energising them. Ward sees the forwards clicking and a bond deepening among the whole team. They lost Mickey Burke to injury against Laois. They loved Burke, with his scraggly beard and the websites devoted to the cult of Mickey. Playing Dublin always brings its own incentives. Succeeding for each other means even more.
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“For us to be really happy as a team, we have to win something. Being competitive was probably enough for us last year. Maybe as a group we were happy to not get hammered by anybody. That’s not what we’re like now. If we lost to Dublin there’ll obviously be lots of lessons taken from that. If we do overcome Dublin, it’s massive. It’s huge. It’s a massive boost of confidence that things are going in the right direction. Everything has to be analysed properly, but we’ve had a lot of self-analysis over the last while and we think we’re heading in the right direction.”
Yesterday Ward will have kicked 30 balls at the posts back home and settled himself into the weekend’s rhythms. The Dubs this afternoon won’t worry him. Nor will the first free. These days he was made for. These kicks he was born to take.
DUBLIN V MEATH
Apart from putting them within touching distance of a record-equalling sixth Leinster title in succession, victory against Meath today will edge Dublin closer to their greatest period of dominance over Meath since the beginning of their rivalry in 1894
Another win will extend Dublin’s unbeaten run to six matches (including one draw in 2007). Their last defeat to Meath came in the 2001 Leinster final
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Dublin have only exceeded that feat once in their history, enjoying a seven-match unbeaten run between 1974 and 1984 (including one draw in 1983)
Meath’s longest unbeaten run against Dublin came between 1945 and 1953 that stretched to five matches, though that included one draw. Similarly, they did keep the Dubs at bay for five successive games in 1990 and 1991, but three epic draws in 1991 put much of the meat on that achievement