Once Dublin were beaten, Pat Collins knew he had a story.
No matter what else happened as he chronicled the adventures of Westmeath in the 2004 championship, he had the story of their win over Dublin on tape.
After all the hours of footage, he now had a convulsive drama around which he could build.
But it turned out that that famous June day in Croke Park was only the beginning.
And by the end, Collins had ‘Marooned’, the acclaimed documentary about Westmeath’s season for all times, and one of the best-told Irish sports stories in any medium.
One Dublin were beaten, Pat Collins knew he had a story to tell about Westmeath’s season
He just happened to be around to chronicle the summer in which they won their only Leinster senior football championship.
At the centre of the story, the team, and at times what felt like the universe itself, was Páidí Ó Sé, on a painful rebound from Kerry after his time there was ended following defeat to Tyrone in an infamous All-Ireland semi-final in 2003.
Ó Sé was, as Collins remembers him now, ‘kind of an epic character’, and he is the dominant figure in ‘Marooned’. It couldn’t be any other way – there hasn’t been a figure like him in Irish sport.
The star footballer who grew up within splashing distance of the Atlantic, eight-time All-Ireland winner, friend of Taoisigh, famous enough to be known by his first name, the man who pulled Kerry out of its 11-year wait for Sam Maguire, then rejected by his own as football took a violent tactical jolt that threatened to leave him flat-footed for the first time in his life.
Then came Westmeath, and one of the most improbable unions in football history produced one of its most wonderful stories.
Páidí O Sé managing Westmeath was one of the most unlikely unions in Irish sport at the time
A LEAP OF FAITH
There to record it all happened to be a documentary maker from Drimoleague in west Cork.
‘If they’d been beaten by Dublin in the second round, I don’t know what kind of documentary it would have been then,’ Collins says now.
‘It would have been a very different documentary, and it would have been fairly downbeat.
‘But sometimes you just have to have faith in it, that something good is going to happen and you just take a chance on it, really.
‘It was a shaky venture, but it just ended up being one of those magic times when everything went right, really, and it’s very rare that happens.’
Westmeath go to Croke Park today, appearing in just their sixth Leinster senior final.
And even a Dublin team struggling for its bearings in the fog between the end of one age and the uncertainty of the next one, are fancied to win the match.
Pat Collins reckons Marooned would have been very different had Dublin beaten Westmeath
Westmeath are not one of the game’s heavyweights, which partly explains the magnitude of what they did 22 years ago.
Dublin were struggling then, too. Westmeath stunned them in a Leinster quarter-final, winning by two points after taking the lead with the clock almost done.
That day was the beginning of the end for Dublin manager Tommy Lyons, as the Hill turned toxic and the abuse was captured in a famous photo of a father leaning over the mouth of the tunnel to roar at Lyons, while holding the hand of a small, recoiling child.
But for Westmeath, the most remarkable summer in their history – so far – was only unfolding, like a butterfly stretching its wings, the full beauty only emerging in time.
A TEAM OF SUBSTANCE
There was real substance to that group, fortified as it was by an All-Ireland-winning minor team from 1995 and an Under 21 winning side from 1999.
Players like Gary Connaughton, John Keane, Rory O’Connell, Alan Mangan, Dennis Glennon and Dessie Dolan were of the highest quality.
Ó Sé would have known the calibre of player available to him, but it was still stunning news when his arrival in Westmeath was announced.
Collins understood from the start that his relationship with the manager was vital to the venture.
He remembers a conversation with Ó Sé while they were travelling in a car. Páidí was telling stories about the 2000 All-Ireland win he oversaw with Kerry and only realised after a while that the cameras were rolling.
Ó Sé would have known the calibre of players available to hium such as Gary Connaughton
That spooked him, and days later, Collins had to get in his car and drive to Ventry to reassure Ó Sé that he need not fear traps.
‘You’re very conscious making a documentary like that, that you’re not revealing anything you don’t want revealed,’ says Collins.
‘Journalists have to reveal certain facts because it’s part of their job, whereas if you’re a documentary director, that relationship is key and you’re standing with them as opposed to trying to get anything out of them that they don’t want to give.’
Collins had to stress that point to his subject.
‘I had to reassure him that there might be a few things he wouldn’t want in the documentary, but it would be a true reflection of his experience in Westmeath.’
A ‘LAUGHING STOCK’
Collins would spend much of that summer living in the Greville Arms Hotel in Mullingar, getting to know Ó Sé and some of the players, and the wider constellation of people associated with an inter-county squad.
But ‘Marooned’ endures as a brilliant story because of the voices Collins includes from outside the squad.
Main character energy is a phrase that could have been made for Páidí Ó Sé, but the wonder of Collins’ film is that he made room for others.
The first championship match Westmeath played that summer was against Offaly.
The first championship match Westmeath played in that glorious summer was against Offaly
They hadn’t beaten them for 55 years, and Collins interviewed a 92-year-old Westmeath supporter called Joe Fox before that match.
He talked of being in company over the years. ‘I’d be ashamed to say that I was from Westmeath. We were kind of a laughing stock,’ he said.
But the faith endured, and Fox made a remark in passing that goes close to naming the essence of supporting your county. ‘I’m a bad loser,’ he said of following Westmeath.
This from a man who had spent most of his long life watching his team lose.
Expectation can never be completely snuffed out. It survives not because of hopeless optimism, but because support for your county goes beyond following a team. It’s a matter of tradition, of identity, of love.
And that deep, sophisticated relationship was brought out by Collins.
It’s no coincidence that Páidí Ó Sé wasn’t the only icon of twentieth-century Ireland that he met that summer.
He made the acquaintance of John McGahern, too, and the year after ‘Marooned’ his terrific study of the novelist came out, called ‘A Private World’.
‘Myself and John McGahern spent as much time talking about football as we did about literature,’ he remembers.
‘Meeting John McGahern and Páidí Ó Sé that year, it was like two sides of my interests, culture and the arts, and also the GAA heartland thing.
‘They are two very important parts of my life.’
Collins got to know John McGahern around the same time he worked with Westmeath
THE GRAIN OF RICE SPEECH
They were also, in their different ways, products and chroniclers of an Ireland that Collins believes was neglected for many years.
‘As much as the GAA is very present in Irish society and media now, I still felt when I was growing up that the GAA was seen as being a bit like rural Ireland itself – boggers played Gaelic football.’
The rich, layered world it really was is touched upon time and again by Collins in ‘Marooned’. Westmeath got their day of days, beating Wexford in a Leinster semi-final after overcoming Dublin, before defeating reigning champions Laois after a replay in the Leinster final.
The documentary opens with maroon blurs flooding the Croke Park pitch after the final whistle that day, but one of its most memorable scenes comes between the draw and the replay.
Collins spent much of that summer asking Ó Sé’s permission to film one of his speeches to the players, but Páidí repeatedly said no.
Then, at a training session between the two Laois matches, he approached Collins and said he could record his address to the players.
What followed was the famous ‘grain of rice’ speech.
‘A grain of rice is going to tip the scale, just remember that lads, a grain of rice will tip the scale,’ he told the players, gathered in a circle around him.
But it was his brief address to Mangan that has gone down in folklore. Collins laughs and says his sons tell him parts of the speech now pop up on TikTok.
Collins spent much of that summer asking Ó Sé’s permission to film one of his speeches
They surely include his admonishment of Mangan for getting knocked out of the way by a Laois player in the drawn match.
‘You were f***ed over the line twice, f***ed over the line like you’d catch a loaf of bread and f*** you over the line with a shoulder,’ Ó Sé roared, before he declared, ‘We don’t want to see no Westmeath man f***ed about.’
Collins doesn’t believe Ó Sé had prepared what he would say in that speech. ‘He spoke in the flow of it,’ he says.
‘It’s one of those things when you’re making a film, it’s like a mosaic and you’re trying to put everything together, there was such relief when Páidí said, “Look, you can film this speech”.
‘And as soon as we filmed it, we knew it was strong and that it would be brilliant for the documentary.
‘There were speeches he gave to the team that we weren’t allowed at, that were up another level of intensity again,’ he laughs.
Alan Mangan, left, drew Páidí’s ire for getting knocked out of the way by a Laois player
PÁIDÍS LEGACY
Westmeath’s summer ended with defeat to Derry in an All-Ireland quarter-final.
Collins’ plan was to skip that match, given the enormity of the Leinster achievement, and if Westmeath had overcome Derry, then he would have resumed filming for an All-Ireland semi-final – in which Kerry would have been Westmeath’s opposition.
But Ó Sé insisted Collins and his crew attend the Greville Arms and film the players at breakfast on the morning of the match, as they had done for every other match that summer.
Ó Sé was concerned that the players would be upset if the cameras weren’t around. Given his own well-documented superstitions, it’s likely he was speaking to his own need, too.
He faced off against Mick O’Dwyer in the Leinster final win over Laois, but it would have been fascinating to see how he dealt with facing his own people in an All-Ireland semi-final.
Ó Sé’s deep hurt at how his time with Kerry ended is captured at the start of ‘Marooned’, but there’s a later sequence where he talks about what winning with Westmeath might mean to him.
‘It wouldn’t compare with any of the wins that I had with my own county, both as a player and as a manager. I’m still a Kerryman, and I’ll always be a Kerryman,’ he says.
‘I’m a believer in the green and gold and nothing will ever change me about that.’
Yet the miracle of Westmeath’s summer in 2004, and of ‘Marooned’, is that Ó Sé could bring, as well as his great experience and managerial nous, an elemental passion to the role that made believers of a talented group of players, and then of an entire county.
Ó Sé wouldn never compare any o other wins those he had with his own county, Kerry
RTÉ gave Collins three weeks to edit the documentary before it went out on air; he would ordinarily give six months to that job.
But when ‘Marooned’ was broadcast, it was to great acclaim.
And Collins’ career has flourished. While the bones of it have been in documentaries, he also made a well-received movie of McGahern’s last novel, ‘That They May Face the Rising Sun’.
His fondness for Westmeath and the story he so unforgettably captured remains obvious.
‘The midlands was a place I didn’t know that well until that summer, and I got to know a whole different side of Ireland.
‘It’s very different to the coast, there’s a different atmosphere there and a different rhythm of life.
‘I loved it.’
And he will watch today’s Leinster final, just as he watched last week’s Munster edition and his Cork team succumbing yet again to Kerry.
Collins will watch Mark McHugh’s 2026 version of Westmeath take on Dublin at Croke Park
‘That tradition does count for something, and I think it counted for something last Sunday,’ he says.
‘It’s psychological, and that’s why Páidí could change the psychological dynamic that summer. If he says he doesn’t like losing, or that he doesn’t do losing, that instils a belief in players.’
The preternatural force that was Páidí Ó Sé spent one more season at Westmeath, but the wonders he worked will never be forgotten.
Pat Collins was there to capture it, but also to portray a culture that was there decades before this force of nature swept up from the south, and which has endured after him, too.
‘They are big underdogs, but you’d never know,’ he says looking ahead to today.
Westmeath are back in a Leinster final, their tradition fattened by one remarkable summer, the high point in a century of Sundays.
