LOCKER ROOM:Westmeath's evaporation yesterday represents a serious setback to the game

WHAT TO do with a problem like the Leinster football championship? It keeps letting us down. It lets down nobody more callously of course than the columnist who rests well on Sunday morning having decided that surely Dublin and Westmeath will provide enough talking points to fill a column later in the day. In these days of hairshirts and tightened belts who can afford frivolous extras like research or originality? Bah.

The old competition, like the old column, is struggling for credibility these days. Now that hard times are officially at the door, Croke Park is starting to feel the pinch. Huge swathes of Croker lay empty yesterday for a fixture which attracted 51,458, some half a dozen of them from Westmeath.

Lawdee. Pat Gilroy assured us during the week that Dublin’s 27-point win over Westmeath in the league would be of no relevance yesterday. So we didn’t bring along the match report or any real memories of that league fiasco to mull over as Dublin ran up another 27-point margin.

What is alarming is that five years after being Leinster champions, yesterday represents Westmeath’s withdrawal from the province’s already alarmingly short list of contenders. That’s a surprise. Just last year they swatted Dublin in a league play-off game in Navan and then a few weeks later in the Leinster semi-final they had a rake of wides before going under to Dublin by just two points. Dublin scored just eight points from play that day and struggled to look cohesive for long stretches.

That was a different Westmeath side, however. They were playing a robust style of defensive football with everybody, including the water carrier and the county chairman, back behind the ball at times. Not much had changed yesterday but they looked so dispirited and limp that some of us were tempted to make for the gate and beat the traffic when Dublin scored their third point after exactly one hundred seconds of play.

Afterwards Westmeath men said very nice things about Dublin and the work they have been doing this year but even those of us who feel that Pat Gilroy and Mickey Whelan could be one of the game’s greatest ever double acts can’t entirely attribute the 25-point increase in the size of the margin to their works.

Westmeath were less mean and less mobile yesterday. They seemed to lose heart early and a lot of Dublin’s scores, intoxicating as they were to the faithful, had a training ground quality to them. Which isn’t to diminish Dublin’s achievement. In the Meath game, especially the third quarter, you could see the team moving towards a different style of play and a new sort of fluency. They progressed that further yesterday but in many instances the opposition to the plan was merely token.

The only thing more impressive than Dublin’s use of space was Westmeath’s generous concession of it.

Westmeath’s evaporation represents a serious setback to the game. They are a county which spent a long time rolling the rock up the mountain. After their underage success had been consummated by a Leinster title in 2004, it was essential that they push ahead to become serious contenders for an All-Ireland.

That they have gone back to enduring the sort of margins that Dublin haven’t really inflicted on sides since the ’70s is a worry and something which reflects on the state of the game.

The Leinster championship these days is such that it is always open to those carpetbaggers of either reputation or cash to come in from another world, make a big push and seize the provincial crown. Such an achievement will either get you the job you wanted back home or a bigger job with a bigger wad attached somewhere else. It will keep most county boards happy too. This is a pity and a distortion of the purpose of the provincial championships in some respect.

Westmeath and Laois are classic examples of counties who went out and tended the fields of underage football and patiently nurtured players through until they reached a tipping point. Whereupon an outside manager was whisked in to do the job of getting the boys over the line in a provincial campaign.

Whereupon everyone celebrated lustily and in the season after everything slipped back a notch or two in either county and the long-term gain for all the effort would look in hindsight to be quite modest.

That needs to change. The starting gate for the Leinster championship is like that for the Grand National, it accommodates a pretty big chunk of the football world. Yet when Meath are in recession, as they are now, Dublin tend to be the only side going to that gate with their eyes firmly on the prize that the following September will bring. Which is a pity .

It is harder to break out of the rut these days especially when the five subs rule rewards the bigger counties who have more depth to their panels. Tyrone, though, have shown that a seriously wise manager and clever husbanding of resources can be the difference between Cinderella going to the ball once and Cinderella winning Strictly Come Dancing(apologies to all in Tyrone for that rather tortured and ineffective metaphor). At which point we can but welcome Kildare back to the limelight and hope that Kieran McGeeney's ambition extends beyond a Leinster win and a return to a job in Armagh.

He wouldn’t like to hear it said but one felt sorry for McGeeney last year as his short grass side wilted in championship heat in a most ungeezer-type way.

Kildare will bring firepower and street smarts to the Leinster final in three weeks time and just as important they will also bring a massive proportion of their county population – for which we can only say hallelujah. On the team bus no doubt they will bring some fellas who switched to the game when Mick O’Dwyer brought them from nowhere to a National League final 18 years ago and in Micko’s second coming when he took them to an All-Ireland final.

Hopefully Laois and Westmeath will go away and prepare for that cyclical boom which a small bit of success can give you some years down the road.

It was good to see Dublin moving with such swift efficiency yesterday but the game did nothing for Dublin or Westmeath.

A strong Kildare side over the next few years could help to turn Leinster into a genuine battleground province which turns out teams who have been tested in the direst furnaces imaginable along the way. The direst furnaces imaginable? Whoa! Steady there . . .