Time can be a great healer
Louth football has risen from the ashes of that traumatic 2010 Leinster final defeat to Meath and is now looking to a brighter future
Until Louth win a Leinster title, the men of 2010 may not find peace. Successful teams sometimes tire of their deeds being recalled in counties going through extended periods of deprivation. But the Louth men of 14 years past have a heavier millstone around their necks.
It is like all the nearly-teams, and what-might-have-beens. The Limerick hurlers of the mid-1990s. The numerous Mayo football sides that blinked in victory’s face. What happened Louth in 2010 is well documented and needs no added time here. The people involved moved on as best they could. The only therapy was to keep playing the game, to turn up the next day. What else was there?
“I have heard people saying before that it set Louth back 20 years,” says John O’Brien, half-back that day. “I don’t think I fully agree with that. I don’t understand how a result like that could really set a county back as such. I never heard of a player who said, ‘well, I am not playing football again because that happened to Louth’.”
The team splintered in the years that followed. Maybe the scars of 2010 accelerated that process, but a number of those players were in that age bracket where retirement wasn’t a scandal. By the time Louth and Meath met again in the Leinster Championship six years later, only four of the 19 Louth players used in the 2010 provincial final were playing: goalkeeper Neil Gallagher, Adrian Reid, Colm Judge and substitute Declan Byrne.
Byrne was the last to be involved with Louth, only retiring last year. An experienced outfield player, he was trialled as a goalkeeper by Mickey Harte before he withdrew early into the 2023 league campaign after losing his place.
The 2010 Leinster final men continue to live in Louth and many are still involved in football, a few of them still playing. The only direct involvement in today’s set-up is the team physio, Mick Fanning, a half-back that day. Current Louth reserve goalkeeper, Craig Lynch, was on the squad in 2010 but didn’t participate in the match.
Speaking ahead of last year’s Leinster final, Sam Mulroy said he watched the 2010 Leinster final in the Hogan Stand aged 12 with his father and grandfather, family witnesses to the county’s first final appearance in 50 years. He spoke of a day of anger and tears.
A clubmate of his, JP Rooney, scored the goal in the 63rd minute that looked set to propel Louth to a first title since 1957. Last year Mulroy was captain when they reached a first Leinster final since 2010. They were heavily beaten by Dublin but there was no lingering sense of injustice like 13 years before. Today they are in a second successive final, last achieved by Louth in the 1950s. Fourteen years after the worst day in Louth football history, the county is in a better place.
Declan Byrne, the final sub introduced in the 2010 Leinster final having come into the squad at 19, was the last of the active participants to go in 2023.
Before retirement he went through all the ups and downs that followed that loss. The next year they lost in the first round to Carlow and Meath put five goals past them in the qualifiers. In 2015 they were trounced by Tipperary by 23 points in the qualifiers. Before he retired, the county’s fortunes had been reversed, even if they had better prospects of winning the Leinster title in his first year playing than they did in his last.
“It is in an incredibly good place at the minute,” he says. “There is an awful lot of work being done at underage. I think the S&C end of things has improved and we were very unlucky the other night not to get to a minor final as well, Longford beat us by a point. We could have been in all three [Leinster] finals which is real progress for Louth, it is really unheard of. But there is still that gap to Dublin.”
Byrne, 34, is still playing football, and was a selector with the county under 20 team that lost the Leinster final to Meath recently. It was a first final appearance at the grade for Louth in 12 years and the highlight was a win over Dublin along the way.
“I think we have firmly cemented ourselves at senior level as second best in Leinster,” says Byrne. “To get underage teams moving in the right direction we probably needed a bit of success, a pity we did not get that against Meath. Success breeds success. Unfortunately it didn’t happen but we are in a good place.”
When he came into the squad in 2010, he never figured that it would be his only Leinster final appearance.
“I remember the buzz leading to the final,” he says, “people coming to watch you train.” This time, and last year, there is none of that fever. “It is very quiet. Very strange. I think it’s because Dublin have such dominance in Leinster. They are expected to cakewalk it again, I think it’s a lot to do with that.”
John O’Brien supports that view. “I was driving through [Dundalk] town today and it is a wee bit subdued, you don’t get the feeling that we are in a Leinster final this week. I remember back in 2010 you couldn’t move with all the flags, bunting, and people selling stuff.”
He knows that losing today won’t be as wretched as it was in 2010.
O’Brien, 39, was an apprentice plumber in 2010 and later that year left for Australia, joined by Mick Fanning and Brian White. By the time he settled back into the squad in 2013, Aidan O’Rourke had taken over as manager and the team was in transition. He retired the following year and threw his energy into the club where he still plays.
Seán O’Mahony’s won a first-ever Louth SFC title in 2016, having won intermediate two years before. That was easily the pinnacle of his career. You don’t need to ask what was the lowest point. He knows losing today won’t be as wretched as it was in 2010. The hope is for an improvement on last year’s mismatch.
“I thought we started off fairly well for 15 minutes. It is hard to keep them out for that long. What I took away from it was that a team of that level, they will just wear you down. They are not going to panic, do anything silly, they are not going to give you anything. Can we keep that level of intensity up?
“We are another year into that kind of development. It’s hard to see past
Dublin, there is no point saying anything else. Just hoping for the boys, for their own sake, that they can lift themselves and put in a good attempt.”
A selector with the county under 20s in 2021, O’Brien sees better days ahead. Louth football is more stable in general than when he was contesting the final.
“We played St Mary’s [Ardee] and between Louth minors and under 20s and seniors, I think they were missing close to 20 players. They still had a strong 15 and still had maybe 10-12 subs that had to train after the game. We are playing Martins [Naomh Máirtín] this week and I expect something similar.”
Andy McDonnell, also still playing club football, was the last 2010 Leinster final starter to retire, forced to do so by injury after Mickey Harte’s first game in charge against Antrim. They all carry their own scars from that day, and the lessons too.
“A lot of people would tell us it took us a long time to get over it,” says Byrne, whose brother Ciarán made a welcome return from long-term injury in the semi-final win over Kildare. “The following year, Carlow beat us in Portlaoise. It definitely took us a period of time [to recover]. It definitely set us back.
“That was a good bunch of players, they had the potential to go on and achieve a good bit more, but I think it left us dead in the water and we found it very difficult to lift ourselves again.
“Then you had the retirements of the likes of Paddy Keenan, Shane Lennon and Brian White. Big players I suppose we couldn’t afford to lose and we lost a lot of them at the same time. We went into a transition then.”
The 3-21 to 0-7 hammering from Tipperary in the qualifiers in Thurles in 2015 was one of their darkest days, after being relegated to Division 4 that year. But from there the recovery started, with successive promotions under Colin Kelly and the arrival of Harte and more recently Ger Brennan.
“Ah listen I can’t see us winning, if I am being honest, but I can see us doing a lot better than last year,” says Byrne of the blue mountain facing them today.
“I think we were very naive last year, we pushed up and went after them. I can’t see that being the case this year. Maybe pick times in the game where they can press and go after Cluxton’s kick-outs. I think anything under 10 points would be a big achievement for Louth.”
There are, he knows, worse ways to lose a Leinster final.