How vexed? I don't know. We did not speak before or after the 2006 International Rules Series. In fact, we haven't 'spoken' for a couple of years it seems. That's not Sean's fault.

It's mine. I'm not one for watching old football videos. And neither am I someone who cares to meet up all that often with old football mates. The past is the past. It's an immovable rock.

Who needs to return and examine it from time to time?

But Sean might be mad as hell with me right now. I feel it in my bones.

That's how it was when Sean was my team manager in the 'Meath days' . . . this incredible, mystical individual could be 20 miles away, he could be on the other side of the planet and, if he was thinking about you, you'd feel it.

I've given Sean a hard enough time in the last few weeks. I told him, on the pages of the Tribune, that his Irish team was 'halfassed', amongst other things, and I warned him that he was going to be embarrassed by the events of the last two weeks . . . and hugely deflated by the time this two-game series had ended.

There were things I said about the Aussies and their coach, Kevin Sheedy, as well. And I've been informed this week that Sheedy treated his footballers to some of my criticisms before the game in Croke Park last Sunday afternoon.

Sean Boylan might not thank me for that either, though, God knows, the Aussies did not decide to roughen up the Irish team after buying their Sunday Tribune last Sunday morning in their team hotel.

They've been horsing into us for 22 years.

This morning, as I write about this bastardised, numbskull of a game for the very last time (it seems, finally, thankfully! ! ), I still can't help wondering why Sean thought, in the first place, that the international series would be any different on his watch?

My prediction, seven days ago, that the series had entered its final hour (or 72 minutes) was not one based on a gut feeling that any particular train was coming down the tracks . . . Graham Geraghty's injury, actually, was unfortunate. It was, in truth, more accidental than a downright nasty act aimed at leaving him concussed, and possibly paraplegic.

That said, the series has been book-ended, dramatically, with Mick Lyons being ko'd in the opening minutes of the very first game between the two countries in 1984 and Graham Geraghty being ko'd in the very last game of the series, ever to be played, in 2006. Two of Sean Boylan's greatest and best-loved Meath footballers!

Lyons was felled in Pairc Ui Chaoimh, on that grey, sodden and quite frightening afternoon, by Mark Lee, an Australian Rules footballer who looked every bit as big and mean as the hairy Russian export, Nikolay Valuev, who is about to beat the living daylights out of the world's heavyweight boxers over the next couple of years.

Geraghty, on the other hand, was left in a frozen state on the ground by the youngest and smallest man on the visiting team, a bit of a pipsqueak to look at, called Danyle Pearce. He may not be much to look at, at first glance, but young Danyle is no ordinary teenager.

Let me introduce you to his game, to his 'people'. And, to do so, I'm going to bring you back 21 yearsf okay?

It was indeed 1985 and I was living for one month in suburban Melbourne, with the parents of a true Australian Rules legend, Robbie Flower. The Flowers were lovely people, generous and perfectly hospitable folk. I was spending the month of March in training and on trial with the Melbourne Demons who, still, had their magical head coach Ron Barazzi (think Jock Stein meets Mick O'Dwyer) in charge.

The Aussie Big Ron had bumped into the touring Meath team in '68 (and some of his mates had left Mattie Kerrigan in the same heavy lump on the field as Lyons and Geraghty), and Barazzi, therefore, took some interest in me . . . even down to inviting me into his home and challenging me to a game of chess.

My defining memory of the month-long trial with the Demons was waking up each morning in the guest room which the Flowers had built onto their house, where I would have to spend between 30 and 40 minutes trying to straighten out my arms, before making my bed and making my way to the breakfast table.

For the month, I trained with the youths team (including an 18-year-old Jim Stynes) and the senior squad. I was sometimes averaging two sessions per day. I had never spent any serious time in my life in a gym before . . . same as the vast majority of the Irish lads of 2006 are perfect strangers to the possibilities of what their arms and shoulders and chests could become. Each night, in Melbourne, as I slept, my arms seized up on me into tightened L-shaped objects. Each morning was a new morning of pain.

I had played against the Aussies in the first series in 1984, and would do so again in '87, and over this three-year period it dawned on me (I'm lightning fast on picking up on the brutally obvious! ) that Gaelic football and Aussie Rules are not, in fact, distant cousins. We're not even on the same family tree.

Let's come back to 2006, and my worries in this column last Sunday morning.

You see, the Aussies are fully-grown and fully-developed athletes, and while they are not especially violent, they are good at being physically menacing and performing in a cold, calculating manner. And that's what we got last Sunday in Croker.

They told us in advance what they would do, and that's what they did . . . re-enact all of the passages and episodes of their grubby, bullying behaviour which have been a central ingredient of this 'international' game for 22 years.

It's good that the game is over . . . for good. And it's swell that Nickey Brennan is in Kill Bill: Volume 2mode and wants to bury this game six feet under while it is still breathing hard. It's time!

But, first, I need to say that last Sunday's mean and nasty opening quarter would probably not merit a 'Top Ten' placing if a panel of judges was put together to grade their 10 most punishing, stomach-churning games in the too long history of International Rules . . . in '84 and in'87, for starters, I played in two games which had a continuous psychotic streak the length of their backs.

The two high tackles in that first quarter last Sunday were bad, to the point of being malicious and evil-minded. Benny Coulter was the recipient of one of them, and he's a brave and honest man . . . probably the most courageous of all of the Irish squad of 2006 . . . to admit he never wishes to play this 'game' again.

The nation's commentators and sportsfans, of course, have feasted themselves on the prone body of Graham Geraghty. Here, we're talking about another fearless Gaelic footballer . . . and there is no doubt he came within inches of a life-threatening injury. But this incident was no Brian O'Driscoll 'spearing' moment. Not at all.

Geraghty was tackled fairly and he was brought to the ground at an angle which, really, was not particularly dangerous.

However, it was the strength of young Danyle, his ability to shift all of the weight carried by his slight frame, and the incredible power and momentum he carried through the tackle which could have killed Graham Geraghty.

That's true . . . one of Ireland's greatest Gaelic footballers of all time could have lost his life in that tackle. That's not being dramatic.

Danyle Pearce is trained to tackle like that, and even at 19 years of age he has been built to execute such a movement. What we witnessed in those few seconds as Danyle Pearce grabbed Graham Geraghty, and locked him tight, and powered him backwards and downwards, was the closest moment to a real, live tragedy that we have ever had over the last 22 years.

It was a largely innocent, but deafening and defining act between two 'worlds' which should never have been brought together in the first place. We've had an awfully lucky escape.