Unappetising diet for fans of more championship lite

So an afternoon of low intensity operations and high-profile errors ended with the distinctly unappetising prospect of another session in a fortnight. The 60,058 paying customers who came to see Dublin and Kildare offer up the footballing equivalent of an overdose of Prozac might need some form of coercion to get them back through the gates. The replay may be the first offer from the Bank of Ireland to have no interest attached.

Here was a poor game, the quality of which was made inexcusable by the lack of passion and pace at which it was played. Both sides went away scratching their heads and wondering if they would ever be as bad again. The attendance went away stretching their limbs and yawning. In the Kildare dressing-room there was stretching of limbs and shaking of heads. Another one that got away. This time the game had wriggled off the hook via a couple of penalty appeals which went bad. Eddie McCormack had a view on each of them.

"To be honest, when Martin jumped for the ball and missed it I ran onto it and the minute I caught it I had no chance of kicking it. I was just fouled in the box and thought it was a penalty. I thought there was one hand grabbed my waist and pulled me to the ground."

For the second incident McCormack was less central to the proceedings but still felt the moral weight was with Kildare.

"Just remember Brian Murphy giving the ball in over Keith Barr's head and Declan Kerrigan half getting his hand to it. Hard to know about that one if it was a penalty, I'll probably want to see it again."

Kildare had much the better of the attacking exchanges and McCormack had one bad missed chance himself on an afternoon when Kildare will once again reflect on their own prodigality.

"Martin Lynch played well today, he got good ball in. He laid it off for the half forwards and midfielders well. We were two points ahead 10 minutes into the second half and Niall Buckley missed a free that would have put us up three points.

"Dublin fought back well fair play to them. Dublin in the first round. It doesn't get much easier from year to year."

His forward colleague Padraig Graven joined the chorus of lamentation concerning the waste.

"Have to put your chances away or they'll come down and put theirs away. We should have won it. We were in the driving seat for a long while. When we had the ball we moved it and created the chances well. I think they got a lot of their scores from chances that we let go or moves that broke down."

The Kildare captain, Glen Ryan, was less inclined to rake over the preceding 70 minutes of football and was already focusing on the replay. "I'm sure it was an exciting game to look at. It's hard to analyse straight after. There's another 70 minutes to be played and today won't make a lot of difference. We'll just go and reflect on it. I couldn't see the penalty incidents. It doesn't matter, it's all behind us."

Tom Carr, the Dublin manager, was less than happy at what the afternoon had brought him. There were periods when his team suggested some promise but generally this was as flat a display as Dublin have produced.

"We sat back, lost it in midfield, we had only two or three forwards operating and we were getting caught at the back. We were trying and it wasn't happening. Four or five of their points came from our turnover."

The strange ennui which had beset both sides suggested something other than a do-or-die championship engagement in front of a full house. This was intensity-free stuff. Championship lite.

"There was no passion out there, like a league quarterfinal or something. Both teams stuck to the ground, no urgency or momentum, neither of them deserved to win. Last 10 minutes they had four or five chances, overall they had more of the chances, if they had been playing with the wind they would have put them over and we would have been out of it."

The Dublin bench had been reduced to introducing transfusions of freshness from the sideline just to keep the team's metabolism up.

"They were nearly changes just to keep the status quo. Between three substitutions we made another five or six changes just to steady the game. It's hard work on the sidelines to get them all right.

"Dessie Farrell and Jim Gavin were a two-man forward line for a long period of time. I hope it was a bad day. We'll have to look at this video. Not a lot of quality ball, lot of wild headless kicking of the ball, distribution of the ball. The cohesiveness wasn't there. The return from the forwards was minimal enough. We'll look at the video."

Declan Darcy's first game for his native county was the roller-coaster ride about which he might have daydreamed in times past. How did he feel?

"Relieved. We're delighted to get another chance. Whole performance was very bad in the second half. We didn't play at all to our potential and we are lucky to be there again. Kildare should have put us away at the end of the game. We can only improve from this."

Brian Stynes spent the afternoon toiling in a midfield which became increasingly irrelevant as the game lurched towards the death.

"It's a year since we played 70 minutes of competitive football. We weren't sharp for the last 10 or 15 minutes. Just hope we can turn it around.

So the dressing-rooms emptied. They'll be back in time to catch their own echoes.