The thing about taking a five-goal hammering is that the pain has generally subsided long before it officially goes in the books.
It’s not that you’re not hurting, more that you’re not really feeling anything. Just as there’s no point in hoping you get back into it, there’s even less in getting annoyed about it. You’re just there, numbly playing out time, ticking off the minutes until you can get off the pitch.
When Kildare played Dublin in the 2015 Leinster semi-final, they knew their fate early. Not quite as early as they did a fortnight ago but not a million miles off it either. Dean Rock rolled home Dublin’s first goal on eight minutes, Bernard Brogan pulled on a loose one to rattle in their second after 12. By the time Diarmuid Connolly tucked their third away in first-half injury time, Dublin were 13 points to the good. And Kildare still had to come out for the second half. Final score, Dublin 5-18 Kildare 0-14.
“You feel embarrassed more than anything,” says Eamonn Callaghan, who hunted about in the Kildare forward line that day to no avail. “Even in the days after it, you don’t want to leave the house. You stay inside, away from people. You know that as soon as you go outside, you’re going to meet people and you’re waiting for the conversation to turn towards the match. You just want to get away, park it and move on.”
Though the five-goal beating is rare in championship football, Kildare have shown themselves to be more prone to it than most. The defeat to Dublin two weeks ago was their fourth time giving up at least five green flags in a game since 2015. No other county has had it happen more than twice in the past quarter of a century.
It hasn’t just been a case of them having to live under Dublin’s punishing yoke through all that time either. Kerry ran in seven against them later in that 2015 campaign and Meath ravaged them for 5-9 in 2020. Indeed throughout Dublin’s reign of terror in the Leinster Championship stretching back to 2010, Louth are the only other county to have given up five goals in a game against the city team. For whatever reason, it has become a curiously Lillywhite habit.
The flipside for Kildare is that they have shown it is possible to get back on the horse. In that 2015 campaign, they didn’t collapse in a heap on the back of getting the full treatment from Jack McCaffrey and co. They didn’t have time to – they were out again six days later, facing off against Offaly in Tullamore in a qualifier. They did not get off the pot. They did the other thing.
“The quick turnaround helped,” says Callaghan. “There was no time to wallow in it. It was a matter of gathering for a video session, going through what went wrong, working out how we were going to fix it and getting back at it.
“The thing with a game like that is it actually happens easier than you think. All it takes is a couple of lads not tracking the runner and you get caught. And the video doesn’t lie. It’s not like in a club game where you might let a fella go know you’re likely to get away with it. At that level, you get punished.
“So when you’re doing the video session, the analysis of the goal isn’t about the scorer. It’s nearly always two or three plays back up the pitch and all it is usually a forward not seeing his man make a break for it or not chasing him back hard enough. Once we established that, we parked it and moved on to the Offaly game. You had no choice in the matter. You couldn’t dwell on it.”
If the quick turnaround helped that 2015 Kildare team, so did the qualifier draw. Offaly were in Division Four at the time and had already lost to Longford. It wasn’t a gimme by any means – Offaly had home advantage and a two-week break since beating Waterford in Round One – but it was manageable. An Eoghan O’Flaherty goal late on saw Kildare extend their summer and pull off the extremely rare feat of winning a game directly after a five-goal tanking.
Some numbers to give a little flavour. Between 2001 and 2021, there were 20 instances of a team losing a match conceding five goals or more. In 11 of them, the defeat put them out of the championship. Five of the remaining nine lost their next game, be it in the qualifiers or the Super 8s. Which leaves four who managed to shake it off and win next time out.
Here’s the rub for Kildare, however. For three of those, the next fixture was against a Division Four team. Waterford beat London in 2011, Kildare had that win over Offaly in 2015, Cavan had too much for Carlow in 2016. Only once has any team followed a five-goal defeat with a win over a non-Division Four side – the 2010 Dubs beat a Tipperary team that had just been relegated to Division Three.
So there is no precedent for what Kildare are taking on here. No team in the history of the sport has followed up a five-goal beating with a win over a Division One team, much less the current league runners-up and back-to-back All-Ireland finalists. Look at it long enough and the sheer volume of history lined up against them as they head up the M7 should really be enough to turn them back at the Red Cow.
[ Larry McCarthy defends Croke Park as venue for football qualifiersOpens in new window ]
[ Clinical Dublin put Kildare to the sword with ruthless intentOpens in new window ]
“The problem with the Leinster final wasn’t even the five goals in one game,” Callaghan says. “It was the five goals in one half. Dublin got the two early goals and the most disappointing thing for Kildare was the reaction after that. They we didn’t try and shut up shop a bit and try and prevent the third and fourth ones. By the time they changed their shape a bit, the fourth goal had gone in and the game was over and the heads had dropped.”
So what now? How do Kildare set out to play against Mayo with the wounds from yet another goalapolooza only barely scabbed over? Part of the blame for the Leinster final hiding has to land at the door of Glenn Ryan’s gameplan. Kildare went man-on-man, left oceans of space in front of Con O’Callaghan and stood off Ciarán Kilkenny and allowed him to dictate the Dublin attack.
Thing is, with the exception of mandating Lee Keegan-style attention on Kilkenny, everything else is redolent of exactly how Kildare want to play. And, not unimportantly, how Kildare people want them to play. Baked into the set-up against Dublin the last day was the general disgust within the county at the 2021 final against the same opposition. Under Jack O’Connor that day, Kildare looked like a team trying not to get beaten by too much. They couldn’t come back and do that again.
“This is the thing,” Callaghan says. “After last year’s game, everyone in Kildare wanted us to have a cut at Dublin. Rather than going out and trying to keep the defeat to single digits. That’s the approach they have now. We’re set up all year with the aim of having a cut at Dublin. But you have to be solid, especially in Croke Park.
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“It’s hard to explain how different Croke Park is to Newbridge or any of the other league grounds. It’s big and it’s fast and the spaces open up so much quicker if don’t have a solid structure in defence. Against a team like Mayo, who like to run the ball, who have loads of pace, that’s a huge test now. I think they will have to adjust to being a bit more defensive-minded without taking too much from their attack.
“But what I would say is that Kildare have a great forward unit now and I think they will cause any team problems in attack. I would have nearly said before the Leinster final that they have a forward unit that would be actually on a par with Dublin.
“I know that might sound mad now and just me being biased but they were playing that well. I think they have an attack that can match up to anyone. But it’s just that now, they need to have a balance.”
Now, more than ever.
Five-goal (or worse) defeats in the qualifier era
- 2002 Kerry 5-15 Wicklow 0-7 (Qualifier R2)
- 2005 Meath 5-12 Antrim 0-13 (Qualifier R1)
- 2008 Down 5-19 Offaly 2-10 (Qualifier R1)
- 2010 Meath 5-9 Dublin 0-13 (Leinster SF) – Dublin went on to beat Tipperary, Armagh, Louth and Tyrone before losing to Cork in the All-Ireland semi-final.
- 2011 Meath 5-8 Louth 2-8 (Qualifier R1)
- 2011 Cork 5-17 Waterford 2-8 (Munster SF) – Waterford went on to beat London before losing to Limerick in R3 of the qualifiers.
- 2013 Mayo 5-11 London 0-10 (Connacht final) – London lost to Cavan in R4 of the qualifiers.
- 2014 Meath 7-13 Carlow 0-6 (Leinster QF) – Carlow lost to Waterford in R1 of the qualifiers
- 2015 Mayo 6-25 Sligo 2-11 (Connacht final) – Sligo lost to Tyrone in R4 of the qualifiers
- 2015 Dublin 5-18 Kildare 0-14 (Leinster SF) – Kildare went on to beat Offaly, Longford and Cork before losing 7-16 to 0-10 to Kerry in the All-Ireland quarter-final.
- 2016 Tyrone 5-18 Cavan 2-17 (Ulster SF) – Cavan went on to beat Carlow before losing to Derry in R3 of the qualifiers.
- 2018 Mayo 5-19 Limerick 3-7 (Qualifiers R1)
- 2018 Monaghan 5-21 Waterford 0-9 (Qualifier R2)
- 2019 Dublin 5-21 Louth 0-10 (Leinster QF) – Louth lost to Antrim in R1 of the qualifiers
- 2019 Dublin 5-18 Cork 1-17 (Super-8s) – Cork went on to lose to Tyrone and Roscommon in their remaining Super-8s matches.
- 2020 Meath 7-14 Wicklow 0-7 (Leinster QF)
- 2020 Meath 5-9 Kildare 0-15 (Leinster SF)
- 2020 Mayo 5-20 Tipperary 3-13 (All-Ireland QF)
- 2021 Mayo 5-20 Leitrim 0-11 (Connacht SF)
- 2022 Louth 5-10 Carlow 0-10 (Leinster R1) – Carlow are in the semi-final of the Tailteann Cup after beating Tipperary.
- 2022 Wicklow 5-15 Laois 4-12 (Leinster R1) – Laois lost to Westmeath in the Tailteann Cup
- 2022 Dublin 5-17 Kildare 1-15 (Leinster final) – Kildare play Mayo in R2 of the qualifiers.
