Super 8s offers relief and redemption shot for Kildare, says Feely
THE ‘Newbridge or Nowhere’ t-shirts that became a fashion item at Kildare’s qualifier game against Mayo will get another wear. By virtue of taking apart Ulster finalists Fermanagh in devastating fashion last Saturday night, Cian O’Neill’s men have gone from cause celebre over their fixtures stance to joining the Super 8s party.
Their All-Ireland quarter-final group includes Kerry, Galway and Monaghan with the national fuss created by the previous venue row prompting GAA president John Horan to already declare St Conleth’s as fit to host a Super 8s game.
First up is Monaghan this afternoon and midfielder Kevin Feely paid tribute to the part played by Kildare’s 16th man in reaching this stage.
‘It’s probably a bigger thing for the fans than it is for us knowing that they’re going to have an AllIreland quarter-final being played in Newbridge. There’s no point trying to say we didn’t get a boost with having the support that we did have, you know, 50-50 with Mayo’s in St Conleth’s Park, it definitely helped us get over the line. So hopefully that’s replicated in our Super 8s game in Newbridge.’
The way the quarter-finals have panned out, it’s a glorified version of Division 1 of the Allianz Football League, every team either having played top flight football this year or will be playing it next year. With confidence and momentum – Kildare had 11 different scorers in hitting 3-20 last Saturday night – Cian O’Neill’s team are in a very different place now going in against Monaghan than the side that lost seven games on the bounce in the League.
‘It’s great yeah, it’s back to where we were in Division 1 of the League. We’ll have a lot of the analysis done already for a lot of these teams. That’s going to be very helpful, we’ll have in the back of our minds as well that we’ve let ourselves down in a lot of those Division 1 games. Not all of them, but some of them we let ourselves down performancewise. So we’ll have a massive point to prove going into every game we play in the Super 8s.’
He admitted that the stakes were even higher last Saturday night in Navan than the Mayo game when the pressure was on the team to show the same sort of backbone on the field. A defeat against Fermanagh would have undone all of the benefits of knocking out a heavyweight All-Ireland contender.
Last summer, Kildare put it up to Dublin in a Leinster final only to go down to Armagh at the very same stage of the qualifiers. ‘The mood in the camp was ridiculously tense because of what was on the line. After the elation wore off, it was very much a case of, “Jeez, we’ve been in this position before”, where we’ve had a big win and the next week or a couple of weeks later we’ve let ourselves down completely. So I think there was a massive emphasis on trying to focus on the job in hand because last year we let ourselves down in that respect, having a good Leinster campaign and then in the Armagh game taking our eye off the ball, if you like. We probably got ahead of ourselves.
‘For that reason I think we were very tense, very keen not to let the elation [of the Mayo game] go to our heads but at the same time bringing through that positivity.’
First-round opponents Monaghan know all about the consequences of losing to Fermanagh, crashing and burning in the Ulster semi-final when they were hot favourites. Their summer has mirrored Kildare’s in many ways, Cian O’Neill’s team also suffering a shock provincial defeat before using the qualifiers to re-organise and re-energise themselves.
But for the heroics of Laois goalkeeper Graham Brody, Monaghan would have been out of sight. So for both Monaghan and Kildare, the Super 8s offers a kind of salvation. ‘I think there’s definitely a sense of being able to breathe out a little, yeah. Definitely relief is the overwhelming emotion. We’re going to be underdogs going into every single game we play in the Super 8s.
‘In terms of tension, that will be gone but we’ll still have an awful lot to prove. We haven’t really proved anything yet, based on our League form. So going into the Super 8s against top opposition we’re going to have to show that we can consistently match them.’