The biggest game of the first month of the All-Ireland senior football championship is this weekend. The All-Ireland champions are in action, Donegal are somehow playing yet again, the Dublin footballers are taking on their fiercest provincial rivals…but the game of real consequence is between Louth and Kildare.
The winner will go to the Leinster final, ensuring their progress to the Sam Maguire Cup. The loser will go to the Tailteann Cup, and quite apart from the reality that the disappointment either team will feel on Sunday night will take a bit of shifting, there’s absolutely no guarantee of success in that competition once they get there. For a game this early in the championship the stakes are uncomfortably high.
Louth folk are well within their rights to be annoyed at the frequency with which people have asked Meath and Kildare to whip themselves into shape to start challenging Dublin over the last decade.
While the teams ranked second and third in the Leinster championship roll of honour have cycled through managers, false dawns, new beginnings and unmerciful hammerings, Louth have done the rather unglamorous work of going from Division 4 to Division 3 to Division 2, and this weekend stand on the cusp of a third Leinster final appearance in a row for the first time since 1914.
They are the prodigal son’s brother. All they’ve done is their very best – they’ve worked diligently, they’ve reaped the rewards. Louth did far better in the Leinster final last year than they’d done in 2023, when they shipped five goals in a calamitous defensive performance. After a league campaign beset by injuries to some of their best players, there’s no reason in the world why they wouldn’t be in a good position to go again. Dublin certainly haven’t got any better in the last 12 months.
Louth beat Meath in the Leinster championship for the first time since 1975 last year, and then they went ahead and beat Kildare in the Leinster semi-final. The hierarchy seems to be pretty emphatically established.
So why are we standing around waiting on Kildare and Meath? The answer, we might be inclined to suppose, is their ceiling. We presume rightly or wrongly, due to some combination of history and demographics, that if they maxed out on their potential they would be in a strong position to meet Dublin head-on.
They are both under new management this year, they’ve both won plenty of matches so far in 2025, and their Leinster quarter-final wins were against proper teams. Westmeath and Offaly are the two best teams currently qualified for the Tailteann Cup this year, and Kildare and Meath had to do a lot of things right to get over them the last day out.
But backing either Meath or Kildare to start building on the minor and under-20 successes of recent years has not been a profitable business model. There have been many occasions in the past few years when you’ve felt that Kildare and Meath had no option but to show some fight, and they’ve failed to do it.
The likeliest results in this weekend’s Leinster semi-finals remain a thumping Dublin win over Meath, and Louth to ruthlessly reassert their dominance over Kildare. The Leinster Council will surely hope for better than that though.
They are selling discounted group tickets to both semi-finals, with 20 children’s tickets and four adult tickets on sale for a combined €160, in the hope that Tullamore and Portlaoise will be rocking. That’s all well and good, but competitive uncertainty is what will really bring the crowds back, and Kildare are starting from a pretty low base.
They ended up in the Tailteann Cup last year and then lost at the quarter-final stage to Laois, an ignominious end to Glenn Ryan’s time in charge. Even before they lost their last two regulation league games, and then the Division 3 final to Offaly, it had been hard to get too excited about their five-game winning streak at the start of this year.
So their win over Westmeath in the Leinster quarter-final was a first real marker laid down by Brian Flanagan’s team. Westmeath will look at Ray Connellan’s injury right at the start of the second half, and the black card against Nigel Harte which had them down to 14 men for the last 10 minutes of the game, as key moments. But Kildare won a tight game. In a dressingroom that’s taken as many hits as Kildare have taken in the last few years, that’ll stand to them.
Then again that dressingroom has seen a dizzying overhaul in personnel. A Louth friend of this column informed us that only three Kildare players who started against Westmeath earlier in the month started against Louth in the Leinster semi-final last year. Louth will have Craig Lennon back, and Conor Grimes is likely to feature too. Sam Mulroy looks like a long shot, but they have most of their squad back fit.
Put that with Tuesday’s night’s 0-14 to 0-11 win over Dublin in the under-20 championship – the second year in a row Louth have beaten the Dubs at that grade – and Louth just appear to be a safer bet. Relegation to the Tailteann Cup after all that progress would seem like a major blow, and it’s one I don’t think they’ll have to ponder just yet.
