Louth-Meath promises to breathe emotion into long lifeless Leinster football championships

RTÉ News​

11-05-2025

Before they were rudely interrupted. Meath and Louth meet again in the slightly delayed sequel of the 2010 Leinster final.
It's more Godfather 3 than Godfather 2, this particular sequel. The protagonists from the last installment are greyer on top, several having embarked on political careers of varying degrees of success or else gone on to long careers in finance.
The intervening years have been a long and bitter trial, a biblical style penance.
For the rest of the province outside the capital, the Leinster football championship is akin to Lazuras or Ian Wright's old schoolteacher.
Something they had written off as dead so long ago, they had almost made their peace with the new reality.
By the second half of the 2010s and early 2020s, Leinster football final day had become a festival of recrimination rather than sport. A cue for the airing of grievances.
One team had 'completed it' and now it simply trundled along in zombified form in front of dwindling crowds, until the progressives at Congress amassed enough votes to ditch the provincial championships or at least detach them from the All-Ireland championship (which the provincial chiefs insist is practically the same as ditching them).
Fatalism had taken root a long time ago while the Dubs themselves had grown at first bored and then uneasy at the scale of their dominance, not least because of the accusatory narrative that had sprung up around it.
But then the Dublin golden generation gradually began to depart for the podcast circuit. The more taciturn ones, the next time we might see them will be on Laochra Gael. Despite fears of a remorseless, unbeatable blue machine stretching on into eternity, the succeeding generation don't appear to be sprinkled with the same stardust.
Jim Gavin, the man under whom the Dubs had achieved total dominance, may have even laid the ground for their undoing. Dublin's perfecting of the old game may be hindering their progress in the new game, a notion strengthened by a glance at Stephen Cluxton's kickout stats the last day and the sight of Ciaran Kilkenny blazing two-point efforts wide of the posts.
To discover that the Leinster SFC is a living, breathing entity again is a beautiful throwback and a moment of emotional celebration.
The hotly-anticipated build-up reminds us that everything comes full circle eventually.
Ahead of Dublin's third most recent defeat in the Leinster championship in 2004, provincial officials told the Irish Independent that from a financial point of view, they could really do without the Dubs losing at the weekend.
This was a snapshot of a very different era, when Leinster Council officials felt safe in admitting as much in public and on the record. But by the fractious days of fear and loathing in the 2010s (when even Meath were consumed by the former) the provincial officials had learned enough to keep such sentiments to themselves.
Now, there are excitable expectations of a bumper crowd, precisely because Dublin have absented themselves from the occasion for a change.
Ironically, it was the fact that even Leinster semi-finals involving Dublin had become so devoid of general interest that prompted the provincial council to break the habit of a generation and fix the match for Portlaoise.
The Dublin team of the 2010s would presumably have mown down all comers - certainly in Leinster, at any rate - in any location. But the current side can offer no such guarantees, as was made plain by their league form.
Perhaps next year, now that the buzz is back, the provincial council will seek to exploit the new mood - and stick the semi-finals back in Croker.
2010 revisited
The spectre of 2010 still haunts this Leinster final, its effects still raw for the participants.
The game is so notorious, it is one of the select few Gaelic football matches that has been treated to its own 'Scánnal' documentary, given the clever title 'A Wee Royal Rumble'.
Pat Gilroy's 'startled earwigs' of 2009 were in the midst of an exhaustive re-education and re-programming phase, which evidently hadn't reached completion by the time Meath bashed five goals past them in late June.
Meath were assumed to be favourites against a Louth side who hadn't given much warning they were about to embark on a tilt at provincial silverware. But then much about the 2010 season was aberrant - where did Down come from?
Louth trailed for most of the game but drew level with 10 minutes remaining amid a strong second-half push. Then JP Rooney appeared to have struck the decisive goal, a beautifully taken side-foot into the top corner.
It should be a famous goal still but was sadly reduced to a mere footnote by the rather less aesthetic effort in the opposite goal 10 minutes later.
The Croke Park soundtrack was just a din of anxiety-ridden screeching as Graham Reilly hoisted a skied shot into the square. Paddy Keenan's diving block should belong in the Conor Gormley Hall of Fame but then his compadres in the square inexplicably fumbled the ball as it popped up.
Then Joe Sheridan launched himself like a missile, lunging over the line and into the history books.
The image of Sheridan, sitting on the goal-line, his legs a foot inside it, while Louth players lie sprawled in his wake, is a bit like a GAA version of one of those epic Renaissance paintings. Someone unaware of the incident who'd come across the photo might be a bit baffled as to how everyone ended up in this situation. What zany choreographer had designed this particular set-piece, and what psychedelic substances were in his possession?
Sheridan, breathless in his post-match interview, announced that he had scored a perfect goal. He quickly added that it would have been a penalty if it wasn't a goal, a qualification which appeared to allow the possibility that the goal itself might have been a teensy bit less than perfect.
We imagine Joe, later that evening, poring over replays of the incident, like a referee sent over to the pitchside monitor, before concluding that, yes, he can see why the other lot might be aggrieved.
Quite what the unfortunate referee Martin Sludden thought he was seeing is still subject to some speculation.
It's possible the air of chaos and anarchy that had taken hold in the final half minute of the game had convinced him, on some level, that he needed to restore some semblance of control and authority, and therefore he wasn't minded to tolerate any argument when he was urged to consult with his linesman.
Either way, he wasn't thinking that clearly. A moment's reflection would surely have caused him to wonder why his umpires hadn't put up the green flag automatically.
He seemed unaware of the boiling anger around the ground as he dawdled on the pitch before heading for the tunnel, taking players names for back-chat after the final whistle.
Things took a darker turn as he reached the Canal/ Cusack tunnel and the sight of him seeking protection from the guard as he was jostled and dunted from various angles was unpleasant to witness.
By the evening, while the world was settling down to watch the World Cup final in Johannesburg, Sludden had disowned his decision in his official report and there were petitions for a replay.
Meath appeared at best hesitant about the idea and their talking heads and past players argued it should be a matter for the GAA.
It's easy to see it from the association's point of view. Had they established the precedent that a replay could be ordered in the case of a refereeing cock-up, then it's possible they'd never be able to complete a championship again.
The Meath county board went into conclave and decided, all things considered, that they'd rather keep their Leinster title. The competition moved on but the bad feeling lingered.
Grim post-script
The Meath team of the late 2000s/ early 2010s, who reached All-Ireland semi-finals in 2007 and 2009 albeit without ever looking like champion material, were highly unappreciated in their own time, forever being judged unfavourably against their glorious predecessors in the 80s and 90s.
The succeeding generation of Meath footballers would place them in a much more favourable light.
After 2010, Louth lost a couple of players to foreign travel and, still scarred by the events of July 2010, struggled to raise a gallop in subsequent years.
They retreated to lower division irrelevance by the back end of the decade until Mickey Harte unexpectedly pitched up in the county, commencing his Mick O'Dwyer-style managerial tour of the country.
Meath toiled in frustrated mid-level obscurity, experiencing regular humiliations at the hands of the capital city next door and taking solace in black humour.
Whatever happens this week, the hope is that era is at an end.
The Mick Lyons and then the Trevor Giles generation got used to Leinster final victories and mostly took them in their stride. For the Donal Keogan/ Bryan Menton generation, a Delaney Cup triumph would be a far more cathartic moment.
Louth, seeking to bridge a 68-year gap and gain revenge for the events of 2010, are the sentimental favourites.
Regardless of the outcome, the Leinster final, a sorry tick-box exercise for over a decade, promises to be an emotional affair for a change.