Even if his team’s only score for the final 23 minutes of the game was Matthew Costello’s 62nd-minute goal, Brennan appeared agitated following the final whistle. Asked about the decision, he said with a wry smile: “Looking at my media (county board) colleagues here, making sure I don’t say the wrong thing. Yeah, straight out, absolutely. Disappointed. The two-pointer one, it’s on the TV (big screen) you can see it’s not a foul. “They’re fine margins and we said at half-time the 1% margins, as the rugby boys always say, is what you have to go after. A few of them fell Louth’s way but that’s not to take away from Louth and how well they played. But, yeah, we’re frustrated with some of them but I’m sure we got a couple of bounces our way as well. We just have to go with it.” Brennan must now contemplate the visit of Cork to Navan in their opening All-Ireland group game the weekend after next. He thinks the players will be able to build themselves up again having done so for this major occasion following the historic Leinster semi-final win over Dublin. “Ironically, we felt this was going to be a tougher challenge. You come from the high then come down and come back up again. We probably didn’t train brilliantly the Tuesday and Thursday after the Dublin game. We put in a really good week this week gone. “I felt we performed today. Had we not and been flat, that would have been more worrying as disappointing as a defeat is but I thought the lads were able to take that and come back up. We need to do the same again for Cork.” To be ahead at half-time despite conceding three goals was unusual for Meath. Brennan lamented two of them, the second that Craig Lennon created for Ryan Burns and the third which the 2024 All Star defender scored. “It was poor from our side because we said once Craig got into that channel somebody had to tag him and stay with him, no matter what happens. We didn’t do that so another learning for us.” In the second half and facing the breeze, Meath came under the same pressure as they had put on Louth when they enjoyed it. “It was hard,” reviewed Brennan. “We certainly lost that kick-out battle. We found it hard to get out and in the possession stats Louth were well ahead in that second half. Once they force you to rattle it out around the middle, that can happen.”