Gaelic Games: Croke Park crackled for 70 minutes yesterday as Laois and Kildare gave us perhaps the best football match of the summer and certainly the best story.Not since 1946 have Laois lifted the Leinster title. Fifty seven years of love and failure.
For a county which plays the game so hard and so passionately that wait had become a physical ache. Yesterday they put an end to all that pain. The relief came out of them in an explosion.
The Croke Park authorities asked hopefully all afternoon that their pitch be spared the jigs and reels of the jubilant.
Some hope.
Laois people would have danced barefoot on hot coals beneath the presentation stand yesterday as Ian Fitzgerald lifted the trophy and pronounced himself filled with áthas an domhain.
For great pulsating patches of the second half it looked as if this moment would be swiped away from Laois, however. Kildare played with a zest and a resilience that augurs well for them. They lost two players in harsh sending-off decisions (Laois lost one) and were without Anthony Rainbow and Dermot Earley, two of their key influences.
Yet they picked themselves up again and again and kept coming back at Laois. In the end only the coolness of the Laois forwards separated the teams. Three late points snatched it.
Kildare will look back on the generous sum of 17 wides they helped themselves to and there will be a twist of regret.
"It was a marvellous game of football," said Mick O'Dwyer afterwards. "There was good footballers in Laois all the time, just a matter of getting the discipline right. Overall we got it right today. This was the day to do it. We got it right today."
They did. And gloriously.
They got goals at vital times and although Kildare came back at them again and again they never permitted them to take the lead.
This was a game that rattled and hummed from the start and the three sendings-off weren't in any way faithful to its essential character.
Alan Barry and Mick Wright of Kildare went for second yellow-card offences (Barry in record time accruing his pair of yellows in 10 seconds), and Kevin Fitzpatrick could feel hard done by being sent off for a mistimed tackle on Tadgh Fennin.
Outside of those small controversies the game bubbled and flowed, and the ball shuttled from end to end manically.
Laois though had the forwards and the extra degree of hunger. After so many trips to this place which have ended sadly for them they won one. The trick now is to convert it into something more because they know regret and they know how long it can all take.
After the game Jim Sayers, the full back on the 1946 Laois team and one of six survivors from that day, climbed to the top of the Hogan Stand with his family and gazed out upon the pitch from the highest point. One could only imagine his thoughts as he stood atop this modern super structure and reflected on old times, thinking of old comrades and the myriad heartbreaks of Laois football.
Tóg go bog é, said his daughter.
And he smiled quietly. Not today.
In Clones meanwhile over 29,000 paying customers assumed they would be treated to an exhibition of Gaelic football. Not so. The Ulster final replay was unusual in that Down failed to show up. The side which scored four goals last week and almost bundled Tyrone out of the championship was missing and the matching set of jerseys they sent instead scored one goal and five points and looked altogether unhappy to be there.
In the absence of Gregory McCartan it should be said that Down were always going to struggle but Tyrone's supremacy was such that it was difficult to imagine the entire extended McCartan clan being able to make any difference.
As the years go past and Peter Canavan's lust for an all-Ireland senior medal grows ever keener we tend to take his feats more and more for granted. Yesterday though he destroyed Down almost single-handedly.
Tyrone through, Laois through. Kerry already there and Galway as well. The qualifying series is boiling up nicely. It's late in July and, you know, the summer is just starting.
