DECADE OF PAIN FOR WEE COUNTY
A decade on from the 2010 Leinster final, ex-Louth star Shane Lennon reflects on the controversial loss that continues to haunt all involved
ON the night after the day before, climbing out of a taxi at Copper Face Jacks on Dublin’s Harcourt Street, Shane Lennon should have realised there would be no getting away from it. After the nation raged on their behalf on RTÉ’s Liveline, the footballers of Louth’s 2010 Leinster final squad started the evening at the Dundalk races for one of those beery days designed to forget, but they could get no peace.
The place was jammed with people blistering their flesh with funeral handshakes, reddening their ears with the same message: ‘Ye were robbed boys...’
In the end they could take it no more, ordered a string of taxis and broke for the border of the capital.
‘There was a lot of talk about the game and we didn’t want to be hearing it so we decided to go to Dublin that night,’ recalls Lennon.
‘As we got out of the taxi outside Coppers, who do you think is getting out of the taxi in front of us only (Meath footballers) Joe Sheridan and Mark Ward.
‘They were probably trying to get away from Navan and we were trying to get away from Louth, and Coppers was the common denominator. You could not write it.’
You also couldn’t script how one event a decade ago still reverberates in the most unlikely of places.
Lisa Smith, the Dundalk woman accused of joining ISIL, was refused bail in December 2019. Initially, this was because her rap sheet contained a number of previous convictions, including one for assault on Martin Sludden, otherwise known as the referee who allowed the controversial game-winning goal in the Leinster final against Meath.
It would not be the only time the issue came before the courts. In 2011, another enraged Louth supporter sought unsuccessfully to sue the then-president of the GAA, Christy Cooney. There are controversies and controversies but this felt more like contagion.
Something as big as the dying moments of that provincial decider should play out in slow motion. In reality, it passed in an eye-blink of maddened confusion.
Just over three minutes of injury time had elapsed and time, it appeared, was up on Louth’s 53-year wait for a Leinster title. Meath’s Graham Reilly launched an aerial bomb that reeked of blind hope.
‘The high ball going in and people still talk about Paddy Keenan’s block,’ Lennon narrates the reel playing inside his head. ‘I mean that was up there with Conor Gormley’s famous block in the 2003 final.
‘I know Seamus Kenny’s catch was a super one because he was probably the smallest fellow on the pitch.
‘Had Paddy’s block gone over the bar and had it been a drawn game, or had that goal equalised the game and we all got a second chance... instead you are a point up and next thing you are two down and you have no time to get it back. There was no time for coming back, no time for a reprieve,’ he recalls
And that is only the half of it. Had Adrian Reid not contested the ball as it viciously bounced from Keenan’s block on Kenny, his full-back Dessie Finnegan would have gathered it. But Reid did and Finnegan didn’t.
All those simple twists of fate would not have mattered a jot had Sludden called one of the three fouls committed. Kenny caught Reilly’s catch inside the square; Joe Sheridan only gained possession with a dive that appeared to carry him over the line; to make sure, he threw the ball into the net.
Lennon knew something was wrong in that instant when he witnessed the crowd reaction at the final whistle, but standing at the other end of the pitch he was not aware in that moment of the scale of the controversy.
‘At first, I did not know if he had played enough time. Some of us did not know how big a controversy this thing was, how blatant it was.
‘It was only when we got back to our phones and started seeing stuff that reality hit home with regards to what had happened and that a robbery had taken place. Obviously, the boys who were closer seen it happen, but we were all in a daze.’
What salted the injustice was that not only did Sludden refuse to consult his umpire, who it appeared was of the same mind as the other 48,000 in the stadium, but the Tyrone match official actually instructed him to signal a goal.
‘I don’t know why you would bring umpires if you are not going to consult them, especially when there is so much on the line.
‘He seemed to be so adamant about it, if you listen to the lads that were near him at that moment. And that was it,’ says Lennon.
Except it wasn’t because this thing ran and ran and, in a way, it is still running for both counties involved.
A few years back, Sheridan revealed that he had received abuse in the aftermath, including hate mail sent to his family home, which his mother opened and read.
He was an obvious target, but never for the Louth players.
‘I have not actually spoken to Joe since that night in Coppers but I would have no issue at all with him. We were in UCD for a while together and I would never even think of blaming him.
‘The thing is that it did not do much for Meath either. I would know a lot of them and a good few stepped away fairly quick after that. I don’t think it benefited anyone the way it turned out.’
That is beyond dispute. Joe Sheridan and Mark Ward were not seeking refuge from a maddened crowd in Navan as Lennon suspected, but from a team meeting held in St Patrick’s, Gormanstown, earlier that evening.
By then the crisis had crystalised. Croke Park was embarrassed but impotent to deal with it. The referee’s report, in which Sludden had conceded he had made a ‘terrible mistake’, was final in confirming the result and the onus was on Meath to offer a replay.
And in Meath, there was a further act of delegation as the county board advised their manager Eamon Barry and his players that the decision was up to them.
‘THE BOYS SAW IT ALL UP CLOSE BUT WE WERE IN A REAL DAZE’
Meath’s veteran wing-back Anthony Moyles painted a powerful picture on Newstalk’s Off The Ball earlier this summer when recalling that meeting.
‘It was very emotional, some guys were close to tears and some were very angry and some guys were probably a bit p **** d from the night before. There was a lot of emotion,’ recalled Moyles.
‘Everyone spoke, players and management. Some guys were going, “This is my first Leinster medal and I am not giving it back”. Others were saying, “We won’t play as badly the next day”.
‘It was a horrible situation. We were not aware of it but, at the same time, the county board was having a meeting.
‘They were waiting on the outcome of that. I don’t know if I said it or Nigel Crawford, but we just said this should not be in our hands. This is a decision that should be made by the GAA as it is their match official who got it wrong.
‘If they want us to replay the game next Saturday evening then say we need to replay.
‘It was very tiring for the team, very emotionally draining.
‘I remember the preparations for the quarter-final game against Kildare were really bad — some guys were still mad over what had gone on, others were saying, “Get over it”.
‘Training was quite spikey. There was a bit of fisticuffs, a few rows, a bit of finger-pointing going on and we went out in that game ready to be taken out, which we were,’ added Moyles.
They have not been back since, while 10 years on, Louth are in freefall – they have lost their opening five games in this year’s League and the box only needs ticking on their admission form to the game’s lowest tier.
The neat conclusion is to suggest that the trauma of that goal sent them into a downward spiral, but the reality is that for a county with such modest resources, winning a Leinster title would never have insulated them against hard times.
Lennon still has his finger on his county’s pulse, not only is he playercoach with Kilkerley Emmets, but he was also recently promoted as Louth’s game manager, heading up a team of seven Games Development Administrators.
‘It is very easy to look back now and say that it was the ruination of Louth but I don’t think so.
‘It is probably true to say that if we had won Leinster, we would have a generation of youngsters who would have seen it happen and would have been inspired to play for Louth as a result.
‘That is probably the big knock-on effect it has had,’ he suggests.
It has left marks in other ways. The scenes at the final whistle, which saw two Louth supporters convicted of assaulting Sludden, put crowd control back on the top of the GAA’s agenda.
By the following season, a ban was in place to prevent supporters invading the Croke Park pitch after the match.
However, the incident that sparked those scenes did not invite such a prompt response from the GAA leadership, despite evidence of support among elite referees for the use of some form of video match official as back-up.
Lennon believes that the introduction of a video assistant referee in the GAA makes sense, with his preference a ‘challenge’ system as applies in American football.
Had it been in place in 2010, he would have had a Leinster medal to look back upon when he retired from the inter-county game at the end of 2014.
‘If you look at the NFL, where coaches have a limited amount of challenges to review a decision, I think that is something that could work. I think that is something the Premier League should look at as well rather than using VAR the way they are. Just give a manager one or two calls in a half.
‘Even if you look at Eoin Murchan’s goal last year in the All-Ireland final replay, I am sure there were Kerry players shouting that he had over carried and had word got to the Kerry side-line, and they were in a position to challenge, it would have been a potential game-changer.
‘What I am suggesting is, give each manager one challenge per half and in the final five minute of games where wrong calls tend to be defining, a VAR-like system would operate to intervene. I think that could work for all the big games where there are enough cameras in place to deal with it.’
That belongs to the future but for Lennon and Louth, they get to live with their past.
‘I don’t know how many foreign holidays I have been on with my wife and the first time you drop in conversation with any Irish people you meet that you are from Louth, without any idea I played that day, they will go with something like, “Ye were robbed in 2010”.
‘Sometimes you end up trying not getting into a conversation. It is desperate but what can you do?
‘It is just one of those things that happen in sport and that is why we play it, that is why we are addicted to it. These strange turn of events, not knowing what’s around the corner, getting that crazy break in fortune, it is all part of it.
‘We could have gone down in history, our picture could have been hanging on walls around Louth everywhere.
‘It was just unfortunate that we were on the receiving end of it that day. But that’s sport sometimes and if you don’t accept it, then you don’t understand what it is all about.’