2010 . . . the good, bad and ugly of the last truly epic Leinster football saga

Dublin have won 41 provincial games in a row by 593 points. Their last loss was just one shock in a bonkers year

In October 2010, the news broke: Paddy Keenan had just been announced as Louth’s first football All-Star. A moment of history and personal pride. But it was not the prize he wanted. “I wouldn’t have to hesitate for a second to say that!” says Keenan, asked if he would swap his All-Star for the Leinster SFC medal that got away.

“That would be a far more important thing. If you did win Leinster that time, that whole team would never have been forgotten about. It would have given an awful lift to the county; it would have (meant) a lot more than, you know, just myself getting an All-Star.

“You ultimately don’t play to win All-Stars, you play to win championships and you play to get to finals as a team.”

That summer, Louth qualified for their first provincial senior final since 1960. The last of their eight Leinster titles had been won in 1957, a glorious year that yielded their third All-Ireland.

It’ s a moot point whether Ireland’ s smallest county qualifies as a sleeping giant, but there was no mistaking its comatose condition for half a century.

Little wonder then, for the couple of weeks before that final, the place was “bedlam”, recalls Keenan, their captain and midfield talisman.

Five-in-a-row champions Dublin had been humbled in these mis by a a th, who would be tough opponents but scarcely insurmountable.

And then, as the Croke Park clock ticked beyond the signalled three minutes of injury-time, Graham Reilly shot in hope from the left wing. Meath trailed by a point; Keenan had one hand on the Delaney Cup . . .

*****

What followed in the ensuing seconds – Séamus Kenny’s soaring goalmouth catch, Keenan’s stunning block to deny a match-winning goal, only for a stumbling Joe Sheridan to dive on to the loose ball and carry/throw it over the line – was a different type of bedlam.

Martin Sludden’s decision to award Sheridan’s ‘ghost goal’ has gone down in notoriety, one of the most controversial decisions in modern GAA history.

The fall out was sulphurous: here was one on those rare GA A controversies that cross the threshold to become a Liveline staple.

In the immediate full-time aftermath, you had those highly charged scenes that saw the Tyrone referee physically confronted by Louth fans, two of whom were subsequently convicted of assault. Sheridan, the fall guy anti-hero, would later become the victim of hate mail.

While the attack on Sludden was widely condemned as a disgrace, this didn’t dilute the generalised outrage from Louth (and elsewhere) that they had been robbed what was rightfully theirs.

Sludden’s match report admitted to his mistake but, under GAA rules, a refixture could not be ordered as his report of the full-time score was final.

And when the dust finally settled, perhaps the over-riding mood was that GAA officialdom had been a too-willing Pontius Pilate, using Official Guide semantics as an alibi for doing nothing beyond applying a squeeze on Meath to offer a replay. That offer never came.

“Being a Louth man, you very often don’t have too much good things to say about Meath!” says Keenan. “But at the end of the day, it wasn’t fair for the GAA to ultimately put that back on Meath players to make a decision and offer us (refixture) – or Meath County Board.

“That decision should have been taken out of their hands . . . you can look at rulebooks and all the rest, but everybody in the country who looked at that knew what the right decision was.

“People will say if there was a replay, Meath would have beaten us,” he muses. “But we would have, by all means, jumped up and had another crack at the replay. And if we lost, we lost.”

*****

That 2010 campaign will always be remembered for the chaos of its conclusion. Which is a shame because, without fear of contradiction, it was the last truly great Leinster football championship.

Not necessarily because it produced magnificent champions (Meath were overwhelmed by Kildare down the home straight of their All-Ireland quarter-final) or because the football was consistently stellar. But for brilliant cameos of quality and especially for its endless supply of drama, it was a gift from the gods.

Want a flavour? How about Louth stunning Kieran McGeeney’s Kildare in a high-scoring Navan thriller, 1-22 to 1-16.

Or a Croke Park double-header that saw both quarter-finals go to extra-time; Meath then needed a second day to see off Lao is, whereas Dublin belatedly came good against Wexford. And yet, in the latter, Pat Gilroy’s team in transition had trailed by seven points after 49 minutes and finished normal time with 13 men.

Those hints of Sky Blue vulnerability came screaming to the surface in a surreal semi-final. Even though the sides were still level early in the second half, the game is only remembered for the final scoreline: Meath 5-9 Dublin 0-13.

Stephen Bray (twice), Cian Ward, Sheridan and Brian Farrell would go down in Royal lore as the men who put the ball past Stephen Cluxton five times. Five!

Fast-forward 14 years, and Cluxton is still manning the Dublin barricades but nobody of sane mind expects Louth to hit a handful of goals in tomorrow’s Leinster SFC final.

Here’s why: the 13-in-a-row champions haven’t lost in Leinster since that improbable rout. They have won 41 consecutive fixtures by 593 points – an average margin of almost 14.5 per mismatch.

Louth under Mickey Harte reached last year’s Leinster decider, their first since 2010, only to be horribly exposed after a misleadingly buoyant start. Can Ger Brennan close that 21-point chasm in 12 months?

Brennan was wing-back when Dub

lin leaked those five goals, four into a shell-shocked Hill after half-time. He can remember watching the subsequent Leinster final.

“I felt sorry for Peter Fitzpatrick’s team, losing to Joe Sheridan’s ‘try’ at the end,” the Louth boss reflected, speaking at a Leinster final media briefing. “Poor old Martin Sludden missed it and made a big mistake.

“Very tough for the people of Louth – but it’s history now and 14 years later with back-to-back Leinster finals, so you’d like to be closing the gap on last year’s scoreline.”

For Keenan, history may be harder to escape. As soon as anyone mentions 2010, the first and only topic is that goal.

“When you take the last few minutes out of it, we missed a lot of chances,” he recounts. “Goal chances early doors, missed a couple of chances for points in the second half, we hit the post with one of them, I know myself I gave away two fairly poor frees that you’d like to have back. You know, it shouldn’t have come to the last couple of minutes really.

“I’m not saying you never get over it,” he clarifies.

Raises

“It only comes into the mind when somebody raises it, or the likes of Sunday when there’s a Leinster final.

“We were just so unused to it. Fifty years from the previous even getting to a final at senior level. It’s an awful long time. A lot of people weren’t even alive whenever we got to the last final. We didn’t have the expectation or the culture of getting to Leinster finals.

“It would have given a serious lift to the county [to win], and it should have been something that we’d be building on for the next 10 years. And unfortunately it went the opposite way for us.

“Everything kind of fell apart for 10 years after that, and we really struggled as a county and a lot of players started travelling and left. Even fans walked away from it for a long time.”

The arrival of Harte changed the mood music. Now the baton has passed to Brennan, a player who suffered the slings and arrows of that outrageous summer. A manager now tasked with lifting a province off its death bed by slaying his own.

Nobody can see it happening. There hasn’t been a shock-and-awe event like that in Leinster since, well, 2010.