Kildare lay a ghost to rest

Sean Boylan came into the Kildare dressing-room and they made a silent circle around him, their joy hushed in deference to the great man's generosity. He began:

"Lads. Can you think of a better place to be?"

Choice and timely words. Kildare floated in football heaven yesterday. Forty-two years of heartbreak and hard luck washed away in a Leinster final which was rugged if not scenic, exciting if not classic.

So the pairings for this year's All Ireland football semi-finals are known and novel. Kildare play Kerry in four weeks' time. Derry play Galway in three weeks.

It was a crowded weekend of football, with three provincial finals settled up. On Saturday, Galway needed extra-time and the balm of a soft goal to see off Roscommon in the Connacht final replay. In Thurles, yesterday, Kerry maintained the supremacy of breeding by beating Tipperary with relative ease in the Munster final.

It is Kildare's achievement which intrigues, however. Of the semi-final line-up Kildare have been the longest away from the big dance. Yesterday, at the cusp, they almost fell prey to their oldest failing, of course. With the benefit of an extra man, after Meath's Brendan Reilly had been dismissed for a clash with Declan Kerrigan, Kildare surrendered a three-point lead and permitted Meath to get back on to level terms. Casting off the chains of their own history, however, they scored a fine late goal and then tapped on a couple of points to decorate the scoreline.

For 62,504 people in Croke Park, it was an astonishing finale. Kildare have been also-rans for so long that the runners-up rosette could have been the county crest. Yesterday they beat the team who have built their brand name on reliability over 70 minutes.

Kildare, who played Meath three times in last summer's championship, had treated that experience as an extended tutorial. Kerrigan, who missed the concluding stages of the game as he sat in the Kildare dressingroom coming to after being mowed down by Reilly, saw the irony in the progress which Kildare had made. They had absorbed the lessons from Meath and then beaten the masters.

"Our discipline was incredible today. We haven't been conceding scores in this championship. Our defensive play throughout the field is exceptional. We watched Meath and studied the way they played, we tried to emulate them, the way they work. Today it came to fruition."

There were of course other aspects to the afternoon. Kildare's accession to the Leinster crown sets up the mother of all mind games as Mick O'Dwyer, the father of modern Kerry football, leads Kildare to Croke Park to face Kerry.

Expect a fiesta of flying compliments as Paidi O Se and O'Dwyer talk up the opposing team. O'Dwyer patented the abject demeanour of the man who always hoped that the opposition would go easy on his team. If you were to string his press cuttings together it would appear as if he won eight lucky All-Irelands with Kerry.

His protege, O Se, has learned late the virtue of a tight lip and forked tongue.

Expect nostalgia, too. Three of the four semi-final teams are managed by giants of the seventies - O'Dwyer in charge of Kildare, O Se with Kerry, Brian Mullins with Derry.

That's the foggy past, though. The semi-finals are looming, Kildare were already turning their thoughts to that.

Willie McCreery, the Kildare midfielder, estimated that failure yesterday would have set Kildare back four or five years. He warned of pending silence as Kildare struggle for focus over the next few weeks.

"Interviews blow lads heads a little bit. Always being called under-achievers. We don't want to read anything. We have to get the confidence. We knew in our heart we had to prove ourselves. It's fabulous when you see the crowds. Marvellous feeling. Everyone said after Dublin that we'd never come down to earth. We did. The next game is four weeks away. It's a matter of improving all the time."

John McDermott, the Meath midfielder, had enjoyed an afternoon of virtually unimpeded skyscraping. Yet he ended on the losing team.

"That's the way it goes. We lost the game, it doesn't matter where we won the ball on the field. It's the scoreboard that counts. They've a good strong team. They were below their best today and they still beat us. They'll put it up to Kerry. That'll be the game of the year now."

In a game which ran faithful to form, Kerry dismissed Tipperary's challenge in the Munster final in Thurles yesterday. Leading by a point at half-time, the All-Ireland champions stretched their legs in the second half and ran out four-point winners.

Although the margin between the teams was similar to last year, Tipperary never came as close to causing an upset.

"It was built-up all week as one-way traffic, but we knew we had to stay very focused," said Maurice Fitzgerald. "All we had to do was remember the past few years to know that Tipperary were a very good team and we didn't expect anything easy. That's exactly the way it turned out."

"They seem to be our bogey team," said Tipperary captain Brian Burke, "we just can't get by them. I know they're saying nice things about us and how we played, but at the end of the day that's little consolation because we want to be winners."

Fitzgerald was taking a good-humoured view of the meeting with O'Dwyer's Kildare. "Either way, there'll be Kerrymen in Croke Park on All-Ireland final day," he said.

In Hyde Park, Roscommon, on Saturday evening, a full house watched Galway and Roscommon slug it out in the Connacht final replay. It took an error in extratime by Roscommon goalkeeper Derek Thompson to finally hand the initiative to Galway whose manager John O'Mahoney has now won Connacht titles with three different counties.

Galway again displayed the remarkable prodigality of their forward line. They have three weeks of remedial work before taking on a Derry team whose own provincial final tussle with Donegal was no festival for the purist.

Hopefully with this year's championships the best stuff has yet to be decanted.