Leinster is toughest to win, claims Kildare boss

KILDARE manager Cian O’Neill played up the strength of Leinster football and described it as the hardest provincial title to win. Rather than bemoan the lack of competition, he said Dublin’s level of performance is an outlier. ‘Dublin are the elephant in the room in Ireland at the moment. But in Leinster also. It is a more difficult province to win than any other. I don’t think you can shy away from that fact.’ He insisted that an Allianz League campaign in which Kildare suffered seven straight defeats, albeit a number of them nail-bitingly close encounters, hasn’t left any psychological scars ahead of Sunday’s Leinster quarter-final against Carlow at Tullamore. ‘I can honestly say “no”. There was a part of the League where, definitely, we were a little bit shook. And that was after the Mayo match. ‘Because we were very competitive and confident in what we were doing in the first four matches and we were close. But that was a match where we just didn’t perform. ‘And that was an accumulation of defeat, defeat, defeat, just catching up on the guys. But then we regrouped well for the Kerry match — we were competitive, just not good enough on the night.’ After performing creditably in last year’s Leinster final against Dublin, consistency remains a bugbear. ‘We clipped 1-21 against Laois, 2-16 against Meath to get to a Leinster final. We scored 1-17 against Dublin, which was the highest any team in the whole Championship scored against Dublin. We were beaten, ultimately, by a better team. And then we went into the last round of the qualifiers and totally underperformed. So that kind of sums up Kildare in recent years in my opinion.’