
Vibes and victories: how Robbie Brennan put smiles on Meath faces
Shane Walsh didn't know him at all in the summer of 2023. Galway were still in the championship all the way to the All-Ireland final but shortly after losing to Kerry, Walsh was heading to meet the
Kilmacud Crokes
manager. He knew his name was Robbie Brennan and that the Crokes boys called him Baggio. But that was about all he had to go on.
'I didn't know what to expect,' Walsh says. 'I'd seen a picture of him but all I really knew was I was going for coffee with this lad Baggio. And straight away, I sat down and he cracked a joke about the All-Ireland.
'He always calls me Gorgeous. That's his line for me. The Galway lads caught on to it one day. I answered the phone to him and said, 'Well Baggio' and he was there, 'Ah, Gorgeous, it's yourself!' That would be Robbie, it would be all about giving you a laugh and having the crack.
'He'd be taking the piss out of you saying, 'When are you coming down to training? I have 5,000 fans there every night thinking you're going to be there.' He has that kind of loveable rogue thing. He could say anything to you but at the same time, you'd do anything for him.'
The Baggio thing, we may as well get out of the way quickly. On July 17th, 1994, Kilmacud Crokes were playing a match on the same day as the World Cup final. Robbie Brennan was the Crokes penalty taker and on that particular day, he was the Crokes penalty misser. Everyone repaired to the clubhouse afterwards to watch Italy take on Brazil and ... you can fill in the rest yourself.
There's much more to Robbie 'Baggio' Brennan than a missed penalty. Photograph: Ryan Byrne/Inpho
He's been Baggio ever since. He likes to say that he responds to it quicker than if somebody calls him Robbie. He hasn't tweeted for well over five years but when he did, his handle was @baggio132. 'I'd say it will be on the headstone,' he reckons.
The nickname is a very Robbie Brennan thing. No point taking yourself too seriously, nothing lost in having a laugh at yourself. It has been a handy attitude to have on his side throughout a football career that frequently found him flitting between clubs and communities. In
Meath
, where he spent his early years and in Dublin, where he grew up.
Brennan has always had a kind of dual nationality. His father Paddy was the captain of the 1974 Meath intermediate champions St Johns, later to become Wolfe Tones. When the family moved to Dublin soon after, he was the only kid in Kilmacud wearing a Meath jersey. On the night of his unveiling as Meath manager, he told the story of having to go to Colm O'Rourke's sports shop in Navan Shopping Centre to get said Meath jersey, whereupon his dad questioned O'Rourke on why he never used his right foot any more.
So there has always been Meath football in Brennan's life, a kind of Miwadi in his Dublin water. When he won a Dublin club title in 1998 with Kilmacud, one of their games in Leinster was against St Peter's of Dunboyne. Brennan scored two points that day at full-forward. In goals for Dunboyne was his future brother-in-law, David Gallagher.
By 2005, Brennan had switched sides and was playing full-forward for Dunboyne, having married Liz, David's sister. When they won the Meath championship that year, there was nothing surer than they would meet Dublin champions Kilmacud in Leinster. They did and duly got hammered. St Peter's have won three county titles in their history. They've run into Kilmacud each time.
Robbie Brennan and Shane Walsh at a match between Cuala and Kilmacud Crokes in 2024. Photograph: Tom Maher/Inpho
Incredibly, Brennan has been involved in all three encounters, first as a player for Crokes, then a player for Dunboyne and finally as the Crokes manager in 2018. Not so much a foot in both camps as a life in both worlds. When he was managing Crokes to Dublin titles, he was taking underage teams in Dunboyne. Nobody fell out with him, nobody thought it weird.
'To us, it was a natural fit,' says Shane McEntee, clubmate with Dunboyne and still a Meath footballer until earlier this year. 'We would have seen Robbie as Meath and as Dunboyne, even though he grew up with Kilmacud. He was very obviously intent on managing from very early on.
'I would have helped him out with a minor team at one stage and he had done a few years with Kilmacud by then. You could just tell he was very modern, very tactically-minded. He's very analytical about football. His trajectory was always headed towards a high level.'
Through it all, his good humour and easy manner was his calling card. He managed St Sylvester's in Malahide, then teamed up with Gabriel Bannigan at Kilmacud before taking the reins himself in 2018. Crokes had gone eight years without a Dublin title at that stage and hadn't so much as been to a county final since 2012.
'He wouldn't have been hands-on at all under Gabriel,' says Paul Mannion. 'When he took it on himself, we had gone through years of massive underperformance. Disappointing results, knocked out early, didn't get close to a final really. For us, for where we were at that time, Robbie's approach really worked for us.
Robbie Brennan enjoyed plenty of success with Kilmacud Crokes. Photograph: Ryan Byrne/Inpho
'It's almost like he put an arm around the team. I don't think the team needed someone to be coming in cracking the whip in the way other managers might have done. He sensed that probably and felt he just needed to come in and be himself. He just has that jovial kind of spirit to him.'
Mannion's first response when asked what he thinks of when he thinks of Brennan is much the same as Walsh and McEntee. 'A good friend, first off,' he says. 'Not the most typical in that sense when it comes to a manager. He's a friend to all of us. Some managers like to keep their distance and that works for them. But that's not him. What works for Robbie is probably the opposite.'
But if that's all he was, it wouldn't be enough. Brennan led Kilmacud to four Dublin titles in six years, including the first three-in-a-row in the club's history. In 55 years of the Leinster club championship, he's the only manager to oversee a three-in-a-row. Back-to-back All-Ireland finals, the second ending with Crokes on the Hogan Stand. You need more than good vibes and a bit of slagging to build that kind of CV.
Having the players helps, clearly. Crokes had the likes of Mannion, Rory O'Carroll and Craig Dias about the place before Walsh ever set foot in Stillorgan. Cian O'Sullivan was around for a while but no sooner had he retired than Theo Clancy came through. But for all that they had the ingredients, they needed Brennan to convince them they were worthy of the plate.
'I remember meeting him in early 2021,' Mannion says. 'We had the bad loss to Mullinalaghta in 2018 and then early exits from the Dublin championship over the next couple of years. We were having a chat about the plan for the year and he was like, 'I fully believe there's an All-Ireland in this group.'
'We went on to lose the final to Kilcoo at the end of that season and won it the following year. But when he said it to me that time, with the losses we'd had and how inconsistent we'd been, I remember thinking that I just personally didn't see it at all. He was just convinced there was an All-Ireland there when, truthfully, I don't think the players ourselves saw that at all.'
Meath's Shane McEntee against Galway in 2022. Photograph: Ben Brady/Inpho
The parallels with what Meath have achieved under Brennan this summer are obvious. This weekend two years ago, they were in the Tailteann Cup final. Anyone suggesting they'd go from there to beating Kerry, Dublin and Galway in the 2025 championship would have been laughed out of Croke Park that day. Yet here they are.
McEntee would have dearly loved to be part of it. He's still only 31 and was the Meath captain as recently as 2022 so age is no barrier. But he's had two back surgeries in recent years and however willing the spirit, the body won't play ball. Brennan had him in late last year as part of the extended panel but when time came to pare it back ahead of the league, McEntee didn't make the cut. Couldn't, basically.
It means he has a unique perspective on the Meath season under the new manager. McEntee was there for those initial couple of months when Brennan was bedding in, setting a tone and unifying the group. He sat in the team meetings and listened as the new man set about them.
It was the middle of the winter slog and the sports-and-conditioning guys were working on their bodies. But Brennan knew that unless they had belief in what was possible, all the gym work in the world was pointless.
'Robbie makes fellas feel very good in themselves,' McEntee says. 'He's really positive, really upbeat. He made a comment about Jordan [Morris] early in the year while I was sitting there. He was talking about the level he thinks Jordan is at, that he's up there with the top forwards in the country.
'That's not really an Irish thing. It's not really a GAA thing to make these big brash statements. And having seen Jordan play a lot, I could see what he was getting at. But he has reached new heights this year. He has proved Robbie right.
Meath manager Robbie Brennan hopes his team can overcome Donegal in an All-Ireland semi-final this weekend. Photograph: Morgan Treacy/Inpho
'I think Robbie was saying that based on his potential more so than his consistent intercounty form to that point. But there could well be a correlation there between the amount Robbie was praising him and the level of confidence he's playing with. Because Jordy has obviously been phenomenal this year.'
Walsh was standing at the other end of Croke Park a fortnight ago as Meath ate the final minute before the hooter. He reckons he was resigned to Galway's fate before the rest of them – he didn't hold out much hope of a Brennan team mismanaging the dying seconds. They didn't get to see each other on the pitch but his phone pinged afterwards with 'a lovely message' from his old boss.
'For a big fella, he's well able to shed a tear,' Walsh says. 'But he has a winning mentality. I don't know if that comes from him rubbing off on players or players rubbing off on him. But whatever it is, he's about winning. He's not in it for a lovely story about Meath getting to a quarter-final or a semi-final. He's in it for the main thing.
'And you can see he has it with the Meath lads. They have that energy with him. When they beat us the last day, you could see loads of them running over to him and celebrating with him. And a lot of that I'm sure is down to the belief he's instilled in them. He'd make you feel 10ft tall.'
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