The difference with Louth in 2024 is that they’re heading to Croke Park full of belief

The worst? Well now, there’s a question. Since we’re talking about Louth football here, we probably need to add a couple of filters in order to isolate the subgroup on that one. Worst year? Worst beating? Worst non-2010-Leinster-final catastrophe? What exactly are you after?

Maybe we should go with some sample charges, just from the past decade. In 2015, Louth’s summer ended with a 23-point defeat to Tipperary in the qualifiers. On the same bill in Thurles that day, Limerick, Dublin, Clare and Cork played out the second round of the hurling qualifiers – none of them came within 10 points of the 3-21 conceded by Louth to the Tipp footballers.

In 2018, they lost all seven matches to get booted out of Division Two, took an 11-point scutching from Carlow in Leinster and went out of the qualifiers after a 10-point demolition by Leitrim. A routine batting collapse.

In 2020, Louth dropped to Division Four (second time in four years) and followed it up by losing to Longford in the one-and-done championship. On a rotten November day in Pearse Park, Sam Mulroy provided their entire total of 1-7.

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One scorer in a championship season. Hard to beat that for bad.

Look at them now, only four years on. As noted by Pat Nolan of the Mirror during the week, Louth are the 24th county to make it as far as the All-Ireland quarter-finals since they were instituted in 2001. The others who haven’t all played in the Tailteann Cup this year. Louth have only been to the last 12 on two other occasions – 2007 and 2010. Everything about this is new.

“We never had any problem planning our summer holidays,” laughs Pádraig Califf, a Louth lifer and former selector. “We just pencilled in the first round of the Leinster Championship and the qualifiers and said we could do what we liked after that. If this keeps up, we’ll be going skiing in January!

“It’s fantastic. I’m 69 and I’m going to Louth matches since I was small enough to be lifted over the stiles. I never thought I’d see this. Everywhere you go, there’s flags out and kids wearing Louth jerseys. That never happened before.”

By most metrics, Louth shouldn’t have had to wait this long. The Wee County tag has always been a bit misleading – there are more people living in Louth than there are in Mayo. By population, Dundalk and Drogheda are the two biggest towns in the Republic outside the cities. Proximity to Dublin means the commuter belt stretches all the way to the Cooley peninsula. They should not be short of footballers.

“It’s a bit of a mystery,” says Andy McDonnell, who played for Louth on and off between 2010 and 2021. “There have been some great players but we haven’t been consistent. Soccer is a big thing, obviously. The fact that there are two league of Ireland clubs in Louth has definitely had an effect over the years. But at one stage there we only made two Leinster semi-finals in 14 years. That’s poor going.”

The other usual measurements haven’t been great either. No Louth club has ever won a Leinster Championship. None has even made a final since Mattock Rangers in 2002. Their last under-20/21 title was in 1981, although they did make the final this year. Every other Leinster county apart from Carlow and Kilkenny have been Leinster minor champions since Louth’s last title in 1953. They’ve been in one minor final in the past half-century, a 2017 defeat to Dublin.

“There were so many bad days,” recalls Califf. “Even when you go back to one of the best days ever – in 1966, we beat Longford in the first round of Leinster. And they were National League champions at the time. And Jesus, I remember us coming out of that game thinking Louth were going to win the All-Ireland. But Dublin beat us in the next round – and Dublin were no good at the time at all.

“Some of the bads would kill you. You’d be drawn out against Carlow and then you’d get beaten and you’d go home thinking, ‘What are we at here? Where do we go from here? There’s just no way out.’ The good days were probably drawing Dublin and getting hammered, just to get it over with.”

So what changed it? There’s no getting away from the truth – Mickey Harte changed it. Anyone you talk to in Louth, even the ones who can barely bring themselves to say Harte’s name out loud, points to his arrival in late 2020 as the turning point. Along with Gavin Devlin, Harte changed the way Louth football saw itself.

“You have to mention Mickey Harte,” says McDonnell, who was around for Harte’s first season before injuries called time on his career. “He came in and himself and Gavin did good work there for the three years they were there. There was a shift in focus and there was a big commitment there that has fed into this.”

Harte’s influence can’t be understated. They were in Division Four when he took over. Maybe the only way was up – and clearly, results since have shown he had enough talent at his disposal to get out of the basement in short order. But Louth had never stayed at rock bottom for too long. The issue was always going to be finding a way to set their floor further up.

“He brought belief,” says Califf, whose son James was part of the panel when Harte took over. “What you’re seeing with Louth now started with the belief that Mickey Harte brought to the whole scene. He told them they were every bit as good as footballers as players in other counties that were doing better than them. That was the starting point.

“In any other era for a long time going back, Louth would have lost that game against Cork last weekend. That was exactly the sort of game that we came away from countless times over the years with a hard luck story. We’d be in the car on the way home going, ‘If we’d only done this or we’d only done that.’ But they hung in there and believed right to the end last Sunday. That’s the big difference.”

What Harte flash fried, Ger Brennan has put into the oven at a low heat, deepening the flavour. Insiders say he hasn’t changed very much at all around the Louth camp. He has given the playing group their head, encouraging them to work through game situations without waiting on cues from the sideline. They are methodical and systematic, unhurried in close games.

In last year’s Sam Maguire competition, they were involved in two games that were decided by a goal or less and lost them both. This time around, they’ve also been in two games decided by a goal or less and lost neither. When last Sunday came right down to the wire, they waited Cork out and pounced like panthers. Mulroy’s winning free was a reward for the adventure their more vaunted opposition refused to show.

“Ger Brennan deserves huge credit,” says McDonnell. “He is a good person, a good people person. I know that he has used the example of Monaghan to show them what they should be aiming for. And he’s dead right.

“The big thing now is that they don’t become a one-year wonder. There’s a good under-20s team there that got to a Leinster final this year and I know the five or six of them are in around the panel now. That’s brilliant. We need to keep building and make things like this the norm every year.”

That’s down the line though. For now, the novelty is a beautiful thing. Louth play Donegal and even though it’s Jim McGuinness and even though they’re Ulster champions, every conversation in Louth this week is infused with possibilities. Nobody is going up for the day out.

“That’s the thing I never thought I’d see,” says Califf. “Everybody believes there’s a possibility that we might do something. Everybody says the same thing – if we can keep it tight, if we can get to the last 10 minutes still in touch, these boys are a hell of a bunch. They won’t be scared of it. No Louth fan is going on Sunday thinking we can’t win.

“That’s such a difference to how we usually go to Croke Park. Normally, all we’d be talking about going up there is where will we be stopping off on the way home. But nobody is going for the day out. Everybody believes we can beat Donegal. That’s incredible really.”

Last Sunday, Califf and McDonnell and all the other Louth supporters were on the pitch in Inniskeen, smiles cracking their cheeks, wonder wetting their eyes. They looked around and saw kids swarming Mulroy and Tommy Durnin and all the rest, hanging off them for selfies, wringing every last drop out of the day. Whatever happens from here, they’ll carry that with them.

No worst. Not this year.

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