Louth v Kerry: The rivalry that created modern football and built Croke Park

This weekend will be the fourth championship meeting of Kerry and Louth. It is unlikely to have any major impact on this year’s All-Ireland but it marks 110 years since their most extraordinary meeting – one that had huge ramifications for the GAA as a whole.

What came out of it was the biggest crowd ever to have attended a sporting event in Ireland at the time and the acclamation of football as the pre-eminent spectator sport in Ireland, a status it has never lost in terms of attendance figures.

As a spectacle, it benefited from the new rule reducing players on a team from 17 to 15. That reduction opened up space on the field and made the game more exciting.

The event responsible was a match – paradoxically not an All-Ireland but the 1913 Croke Memorial final, a competition that was inaugurated that year to raise funds for the commemoration of the GAA’s first patron Archbishop Thomas Croke, who had died in 1902.

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So successful did it prove that sights were raised higher than simply the original plan of commissioning a statue in Thurles and the decision was taken in late 1913 to buy a headquarters venue in Dublin.

Bear in mind that the original plan had been to swell the £308 in the kitty to £1,000 through gate receipts from the tournament.

Five counties had been invited to participate: Cork, Kerry, Dublin, Louth and Antrim. Louth were a rising force in football and by 1913, had won two of the previous four All-Irelands and lost one of the other finals to Kerry. It was no surprise when the counties met in the Croke Memorial final.

According to Richard McElligott, lecturer in Irish and modern history at Dundalk IT and author of the widely praised Forging a Kingdom, about the early years of the GAA in Kerry: “The Croke Memorial final in 2013 was four years in the making. Louth burst on the scene in 1909 whereas Kerry was already established with back-to-back All-Irelands in 1903 and ‘04. When they met in that year’s [1909] All-Ireland, Kerry won comfortably but Louth unsuccessfully lodged repeated objections. That was the beginning of the bad blood.”

They should have met again in 1910 but Kerry refused to travel for the final in protest at the lack of consideration from the Great Southern and Western Railway company, which refused to give the team and its entourage a separate carriage at discounted rates.

This wasn’t specific to Kerry, according to McElligott. “Railway companies were seen nationally as treating match traffic dismissively, even though it brought huge business to them. I think when Kerry refused to back down, the GSWR realised that they were killing the golden goose.”

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If Kerry imagined that their strike for GAA rights would be recognised, however, they were wrong. Louth were awarded the All-Ireland for 1910. What happened next was also inflammatory.

Kerry issued a challenge to the new champions and a response, purporting to be from the Louth county board, said that they would send their junior team. This was published nationally and caused outrage in Kerry.

The Kerryman stated that “not since the inception of the GAA was such an insult heard of”.

Temperatures rose and hadn’t really cooled by 1913. In 1911, neither county emerged from their province and, a year later, with Louth in the final and Kerry expected to breeze through their semi-final with Antrim, there took place what was described by Sport magazine as “perhaps the most sensational GAA result of all time”. Kerry were beaten.

The bottom line was that Louth and Kerry still hadn’t met in a big match until May 4th, 1913, when the Croke final was played. A high degree of excitement settled on the occasion. An estimated crowd of 26,000 attended and it took £750 in gate receipts, easily exceeding the modest target set and even better, ended in a draw: Kerry 0-4, Louth 1-1.

What excitement had blazed in the lead-up to the final – contributions to Kerry’s training fund were sent from New York – turned into a conflagration for the replay on June 29th.

The attendance was estimated at anything between 35,000 and 50,000. The GSWR had trains running on every line, bringing 11,328 passengers to Dublin.

“Every bit of rolling stock and every last carriage was pressed into action,” says McElligott. “The railways had learned the hard way.”

Kerry won the replay 2-4 to 0-5. The funds generated were huge and, later that year, Central Council gave the go-ahead on October 4th, 1913, to purchase the ground on Jones’s Road for £3,500 and refurbish it with the aid of a £2,000 loan from the Munster and Leinster Bank.

Reflecting on this weekend’s renewal of Kerry and Louth in an All-Ireland fixture, McElligott summarises.

“Most people will say, ‘Kerry-Louth – what rivalry’, but I would suggest the next time supporters walk into Croke Park, they pause and think about it because they wouldn’t have the stadium there but for that rivalry. It was brief but it was intense and, in historical terms, one of the most significant rivalries because of what came out of it.”