Alex Beirne pictured at the launch of the Leinster Senior Football Championship.
By Kevin Egan
This time 12 months ago, Kildare football was deemed to have been in a very different place. The Lily Whites had just been relegated from Division One of the Allianz Football League, but they still enjoyed a hugely encouraging Spring campaign that featured a famous home win over Dublin, a draw with Kerry and several other very competitive displays.
Going into the Leinster championship, Glen Ryan’s troops were perceived as a very real threat to Dublin’s dominance in the Eastern province, and wins over Louth and Westmeath en route to the final only cemented that view.
Five first half goals for the boys in blue in the final blew all that optimism out of the water, and it feels that in a sense, Kildare still haven’t properly recovered.
Now, going into the 2023 championship, instead of being marked out as a live threat to Dublin’s dominance, some are asking the question if another disappointing league leaves them vulnerable to an upset to another neighbour – Wicklow – this Sunday afternoon in Carlow.
“It’s hard to put your finger on it” admits Alex Beirne, the Naas forward who is going into his third championship campaign this summer.
“We’ve done a lot of talking about it and analysis on games and trained really hard and tried to get it right. As a forward, it kind of snowballs and after a couple of games you’re kind of low on a bit of confidence and just things aren’t falling right when other times they might be.
“It was nice to finish the league off strongly with two decent performances but still there’s work to do”.
There certainly were green shoots of recovery at the end of campaign as they finished up with wins over Limerick and Meath, but Beirne is still very conscious of the fact that the public mood around the Short Grass County is very different to last year.
“The hype is not around, and it’s probably rightfully not around” he says.
“Whether it was warranted or not last year, we obviously had a good result against [Dublin] in the league in St. Conleth’s, which is of course a completely different place to Croke Park, but that gave us a lot of confidence. We were relegated but we were competing much better.
“Even so, there’s still confidence and belief in this group, we wouldn’t be here if there wasn’t”.
Alex Beirne of Kildare in action against Cathal Downes of Limerick during the Allianz Football League Division 2 match between Limerick and Kildare at TUS Gaelic Grounds in Limerick.
Confidence that the Leinster championship is winnable?
“We do believe it as a group and as long as I’ve been in there, we’ve believed it. I presume before I was in there, knowing the lads who were there, they would have as well.
It is a tough task; Dublin are one the top three or four teams in the country at least, so again it’s not an easy ask but it’s something we look towards, and there’s frustration there that we haven’t made the breakthrough.
“We’re probably just not getting the most out of ourselves at the moment so we’re working really hard on that side of things. Twenty odd years without a Leinster Championship, and ten years some lads might have been on that team. David Hyland and Mark Donnellan played their one-hundredth game and with all due respect, they’ve nothing really to show for it, so yeah, there is frustration in the group”.
Without doubt, the foundations are in place. Another Leinster underage final appearance was secured during the week when Kildare powered across the finish line in what turned out to be a surprisingly one-sided Eirgrid Leinster U-20 FC semi-final win over neighbours Laois, while two wins out of two for this year’s minor crop so far, as well as another Leinster Post Primary Schools title for Beirne’s alma mater of Naas CBS, shows that the production lines are moving smoothly.
“The U-20s won an All-Ireland in 2018 and got to an [U20] All-Ireland final last year. There’s no one in from that team this year but there are a lot of lads who are still eligible from that team who play twenties again, hopefully we’ll see them in the next couple of years coming through. There was a couple of minor championships won back in ‘15 and ‘16 so they’re now coming into their prime, expecting to go on and win something. And there was a team in 2013 who won a Leinster Championship at under-21, those lads are coming to the end of their career in the next couple of years, so the players here are used to success. But it’s on us now as a playing group to do what it takes to deliver on that”.
