Is anyone afraid of the champions of Leinster anymore?

Leinster SFC Final Laois v DublinFootball in Leinster seems to be in decline. Tom Humphries takes a look at the evidence

There's something a little mysterious about Dublin and Laois having sold out the big house by the Canal for tomorrow's Leinster final. Novelty and buzz and a gathering sense of occasion have inflamed demand and made it roar.

Rivalry and tradition, the normal determinants of prices for the lurking touts, have played no part. Dublin and Laois have no great modern rivalry with which to kindle interest. Apart from their drawn game and replay in 2003 they have scarcely rubbed up against each other at all.

Nor do either set of supporters travel with any confidence that a decent Leinster final won't be the summit of their summer's endeavours. The decline in expectation surrounding Leinster football in the last few years has been so drastic that one can only assume its enduring popularity is down to the competition being a self-contained little entertainment, a universe sealed on to itself beyond which nothing really matters. Hard times and yet the turnstiles are whirring regardless. A triumph of marketing and optimism over reality.

Leinster has sent one representative to the All Ireland final so far this decade. When Galway gently chloroformed Meath in 2001 and laid them to sleep along with the other erstwhile giants of Leinster nobody was to know that they would stay that way. But they have. All happily slumbering, side by side.

Above their reposed faces of course there have been refreshing breezes of democracy. The peasant nations of Westmeath and Laois have had to take a duster to sideboards which once seemed redundant. There have been uncontrolled outbreaks of hopefulness in places like Kildare and Wexford. Happy clappy stuff. In truth, though, the Leinster champions have gone forth each year as forlornly as Irish Eurovision entrants.

To take the current season and use it as a thermometer to stick under the province's hairy armpit suggests Leinster is still sickly. Westmeath, the young provincial champions of a year ago, were ushered out through the back door by a Clare side who had managed six points against Cork in Munster. Meath needed extra time to put away Leitrim.

There's no specific encouragement either for Dublin or Laois in the platter of this year's statistics. Laois bundled Offaly out in the first round with two points to spare. How good were Offaly? They lost to Carlow in the qualifiers. How good were Carlow? Well, 14 points less good than Limerick, who put them out of the qualifiers. And how good are Limerick? Six points off Kerry at last count.

Laois's next victims were Kildare, a side who must have been wondering if their first-round game with Wicklow was a classic or a series of unfortunate errors. Kildare got their answer swiftly when they were dumped out of the qualifiers by a declining Sligo side who were five points a lesser team to Leitrim a short while previously.

For Dublin the formlines are just a shade more encouraging perhaps. Longford were swatted away in the first round and ran Sligo to two points in the qualifiers. Meath, whom Dublin then beat, are still alive having scraped past Leitrim in extra time, but provincial semi-finalists Wexford (once the Great White Hope among the romantic set) got bumped off by Monaghan last weekend.

It's a curious decline in fortunes. In a career which stretched from the latter-day Heffernan era to Dublin's last All-Ireland in 1995, Charlie Redmond played through a golden era for Leinster football. He now lives in Dunshaughlin, where he trains the local senior football team. He has a foot in two crumbling empires.

"I tell them down here that everything is grand. As long as we keep winning and they keep going in the qualifiers. We've four of the Meath lads on the team in Dunshaughlin. I ask them, 'what's it like, this playing on Saturdays, lads? Does anybody go to see ye?' But they know it will come around again. It might be the other way round next year. That's how it is with Leinster these times."

The onset of recession in the province is inexplicable, but it is self-perpetuating. Redmond played on Dublin teams that stitched together three Leinsters and four Leinsters on different runs. He saw Meath and Offaly put together similar sequences.

"The team that has won the provincial championship in recent years hasn't stood and defended it. We won our fourth in a row in 1995 and no team has successfully defended it since then. In our day we went four-in-a-row, Meath went three, Dublin did a three-in-a-row. Even Eugene McGee's Offaly team did three-in-a-row. The ability to withstand the pressure comes with that, from knowing you have to be strong in your own backyard, from knowing that the challenges are there and if you get beyond them you'll be as good as anyone.

"The Dublin and Meath teams of the 1980s and 1990s were very strong. I'm not saying we were necessarily better, but I just mean they were physically strong and very well able to stand up to challenges. The evidence shows that teams who stay at the top in a province get to win things. We usually knew we weren't getting out of Leinster if we didn't beat Meath and we knew if we beat them we were as good as anything around."

Until the current merry-go-round era, Leinster had a tradition of sequenced wins which went back to the Offaly team of the early 1970s. Since Dublin's 1995 title, Offaly, Kildare, Laois, Westmeath, Meath and the Dubs themselves have all had a go at holding on to the Bob O'Keeffe Cup.

REDMOND FINDS Dublin's descent into the mire most alarming of all. "We in Dublin expected to get to a Leinster final, at least, at the start of any season. And we expected if we were going to get knocked out it wouldn't be by anyone other than Meath. We played Kildare in a final and we knew we'd beaten Meath in a semi a month before. We believed that was our Leinster title. After 1995 for us not to win a Leinster title for seven years, that was a shock. To not be able to stand up in your back yard. That set us back."

It's not just the revolving nature of power in Leinster. The evidence suggests the province is struggling right across the board right now. Since the inception of the qualifiers, Leinster sides have played knockout ties against teams from outside the province on 65 occasions. They have won 29, or 44.6 per cent, of those games.

When the air gets a little rarer, though, and we do away with the statistic generated by minnow-a-minnow fighting in the early qualifying rounds, the statistics get more alarming. From the third qualifying round and beyond, Leinster sides have played teams from outside the province 21 times in the five years. They have won just five.

By contrast, Ulster's tide has lifted all northern boats. Teams from the province have played teams from Munster, Leinster or Connacht 51 times in knockout in the same period, winning 33 games, or 65 per cent.

Perhaps the dust is settling; perhaps Laois and Dublin have the personnel with which to dominate the remainder of the decade - two young teams unscarred by the over-advertised demands of the modern game.

"Depending on the performance, the winners on Sunday should be able to say that they are fourth in line, but getting over Sunday is important. I think Dublin have the potential to grow and be better. One of the important steps will be reclaiming the All-Ireland and staying at the top for a few years," says Redmond.

"You wouldn't put either of them (Dublin or Laois) in the top three in the country right now. It seems to be that when the power got spread in Leinster the level dropped a little. The football isn't as strong as it was.

"You need to have it tough. We lost All-Irelands in 1992 and 1994 and each year our semi-final opponents (Clare and Leitrim) were a little weaker - sides that were happy to get out of the province.

"In 1992 we didn't even play Meath. You pay the price for that. In 1995 we played Cork in the All-Ireland semi and Meath in Leinster. It's important that you have competitive fixtures all the way through. Leinster teams aren't getting that at the moment."

Tomorrow the battle for supremacy of the scrabblepatch continues.