The Legendary Pat "The Red" Collier A Firm Favourite Among The Meath Supporters At five feet six and eleven and a half stone in his prime, Pat "The Red" Collier could fairly have been described as "a hardy bit of stuff" when he played for Meath. A tearaway wing back, his butty aspect and shock of ginger hair made him a distinctive presence on the field and a real favourite among Royal County supporters. A minor in '59 and '60, he made his Senior debut in '61 and after losing the All-Ireland semi-final of '64 and the final of '66 - both to Galway - they finally came good in 1967 beating Cork on a score line of 1-9 to 0-9. They had been building up to that victory for a number of year and says Pat, they were at the end of their tethers almost when it finally happened for them. "We were knocking at the door all the time but just weren't getting there. We were just like Derry there a few years ago, getting there but just not winning." Born and reared in the parish of Stamullen where he still lives, Pat has remained a keen follower of the game and rarely misses any Meath matches. Recalling the Meath team of his era, he says it experienced some poor luck along the way before 1967. Dublin beat them by a point in the'63 Leinster Championship and went on to win the All-Ireland. Galway beat them in the semi-finals a year later; "I still maintain the ref robbed us in '64 because we had the ball in the net but he blew the whistle and it was really ridiculous what he went on with." That was the first year of Galway's three-in-a-row crusade and the tribesmen went on to beat them convincingly in '66. Galway had a great panel of players in addition to a powerful first fifteen, he says. Strangely enough, '66 stands out in his memory more than '67 because of the crowd that turned out to meet them in Navan. It was a very emotional homecoming: "It was unbelievable. I'd say there was the guts of 20,000 people there in Navan that night, and we had nothing. And to see all those people who had turned up to meet a gang of - I won't say we let them down but we didn't do ourselves justice on that day anyway. But, to the day I die, I'll remember that night because there was about 20,000 people in Navan that night and it just made you feel that you should have something, you know? It felt very sad at times, to see fellas that had followed you the whole year and to end up with nothing." Their defeat in '66 spurred them on to go one better the following year. Terry Kearns got the vital goal for them after the interval which put them on the road to victory but Cork fought back and were unlucky, he feels, not to have got a draw in the end. Sean McCormack made a great save in the goals and Jack Quinn caught a couple of "fantastic balls" in the square to lift the siege. And that was it, they has delivered the goods "after a long hunt". He still has his medal "somewhere in the house" he says with a laugh. Asked who was the toughest forwards he ever played against, Pat reams of a list the amounts to a who's who of the class forwards of that era: Seamus Leydon of Galway, Mickey Kearins from Sligo, the late Charlie Gallagher from Cavan, Paddy Doherty of Down, Dublin's Mickey Whelan, Bernie O'Callaghan from Kerry, Johnny Carroll from Cork, and Liam Leech from Louth ("who was a bloody good footballer"), and Joe Corcoran from Mayo."You earned your bread every day you went out to play on them", he says. Top county teams in those days didn't really have any weak points, he says, whereas on teams today the last forward mightn't be great. He's not so sure that the standard has dropped but explains that, in the '60, more teams had genuine chances of winning titles. "There was eleven teams in Leinster capable of winning a Leinster Championship. There was really eleven teams capable of winning it, and that's leaving out Kilkenny. Longford won a Leinster Championship in '68, Offaly in '60 and '61 and Laois, Louth and Kildare all played in Leinster finals. Every one of them was capable of getting there whereas today it's nearly a tie-up between Meath and Dublin. It is a bad sign and I'm not sure whether the standard has dropped or I think a lot of the enthusiasm for the game has dropped in these counties". Pat retired form inter-county game in 1969 at the relatively young age of 28. It wasn't that he had enough of the game, more that he had "too much of it", he says with a laugh. They trained "bloody well hard" two or three nights of the week in Navan but it didn't end there. He had to train a lot on his own because he was very prone to putting on weight. "I was actually training from '69 on and, and ..ah, you get a bit sour on it and I just said that's it." He was doing manual work with Cement Roadstone at the time which helped build up the muscles and keep him fit but he has since developed a successful tarmacadam business. Most teams had six or seven farmers or builders' labourers, then and these men would have had an amount of natural fitness and strength built up. But times have changed and country teams are as "soft" as Dublin teams now. "They're all computer operators and different things, pen-pushers and all that," he says. Team-mates, neighbours and friends of Pat have probably gone through their life without ever calling him by his "proper" Christian name. He was always "The Red Collier" from the time he went as a young boy to Stamullen National School. The teacher there, a great Louth man by the name of Master Thornton, christened him with that famous nickname and it has stuck ever since. "I was the only red-haired guy in the school actually and that's how it came about. But I'll give you a good one about it: there was an orchard right beside the school and about thirty of us went to rob it one evening and I was the only one that was caught! The guard came in the next day and I was the only fellow he could pick out because I was the only one with red hair. The owner of the orchard picked me out! That was one day it didn't do me any good," he recalls with a chuckle. But his mop of hair always made him stand out on the football field and it was part of the package that made him such a favourite with the crowd. "We got on well together," he says modestly when asked why he was a bit of a folk hero with the Meath followers. But, when pressed, he says he thinks it had something to do with his size. "I was really small, five six and eleven seven, and at that height and weight you have to make up for it with determination, it's your only way." If he played in the modern era, he would probably have been an attacking half back but, then, it wasn't expected of them to attack. "You'd move up the odd time all right but the centre field or the half forwards didn't notice us even, whereas today they are watching their wing backs coming up. Like it's nearly part of his job to go up now whereas in our time it was to defend:"Thou shall not cross the centre field' - that was the golden rule!" The game has changed in lots of other ways since, of course and Pat is very aware of the contrast form his day. The sideline kicks and the kicks from the hand to name but two. There's a lot more running and passing as opposed to catch-and-kick. There was a lot more foot passing then as against the handpassing of the modern era. There was no square ball rule either in those days which meant that the full back had to go for the high ball with a half dozen forwards bearing down on him. The full back has it easier now, Pat maintains, he can go straight up and catch his ball without fear of being mowed, out of it in the square. "If you go back to Paddy O'Brien's time and Jack Quinn's time when the two centre field men and the six forwards were coming in on top of them, you had to make sure you caught your ball and that was it." And was it ye'er job to kind of stop the traffic coming in? "Well, you were a bit of a stopper alright!" he says with a laugh. "You had to be there, you had to watch him and that was it." For all the rough stuff, however, it wasn't as niggle as it is today he believes. There weren't as many off the ball incidents as there are today. It was more honest and open, there was good hard shouldering and that was it. "The refs don't understand a good shouldering today. You see a good shoulder, they blow a free for it and it's unbelievable. Another thing too, you could pull on a ball on the ground even if a fella was going down with his hands, you could still pull first time, you don't see that happening now." Well, that's because you get penalised for it nowadays? "You do, you get penalised for that, which I think is very wrong because unless he has his hands on the ball I think it shouldn't be a free." But you could take the hand of a fella, Pat, if he's going down on it and there's no free against you? "But that time you were told to pull everything above the grass!" he retorts with the hearty laugh of a man who relished it all. Taken from Hogan Stand magazine 1st December, 1995 Tweet

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