January not hanging on Lilywhites
IT CAN be dismissed as a pre-season aberration, but Kildare’s last meeting with Dublin still jars. It was a nothing game, which is just how Dublin approached it by fielding what was effectively a third-string team for their O’Byrne Cup semi-final meeting with Kildare in Newbridge back in January, yet it created a far bigger ripple than might have been anticipated.
That was mainly because Kildare put their best foot forward, with 17 of the players involved in last month’s Leinster semi-final win over Meath featuring and yet, they lost to a team in which Niall Scully was the only Dublin player to see action in the rout of Westmeath.
It may have been far too early in the year to be drawing conclusions, but that result condemned this summer’s Leinster Championship to the joke shop four months before a ball was even kicked in it.
After all, if Kildare’s finest could not keep up with Dublin’s wannabes, what hope was there against their leading lights? Eoin Doyle, the Kildare captain, insists that it never looked quite that bleak from inside Cian O’Neill’s Kildare camp.
‘I was definitely disappointed, don’t get me wrong. It was a game we felt we could win and it was a game we wanted to win to progress,’ he says.
‘But I wasn’t disillusioned or anything afterwards. It was a preseason game, we wanted to win it but we didn’t, but we learned from it.’
Evidently, they learned well. Next year, they won’t need the O’Byrne Cup to get a measure of where they stand with Dublin as they will face them in the League’s top flight.
More importantly, the performance they delivered in drawing the line under a sequence of six losing Leinster semi-finals when beating Meath caught the eye.
It has raised the prospect that for once Dublin may have a game on their hands. ‘Not too many teams have been able to push them the full way,’ says Doyle.
‘I have always said it is up to other teams to try and catch them. If we had 30 odd teams in the country performing at the level Dublin are, what a Championship we would have.’
Today, though, they have to be the ones that give Leinster football the final it craves.