About time this thread got going with the start of the championship less than a week away when Sligo head for the Big Apple.
Kerry are my tip for Sam
I’ve mentioned it elsewhere but would like to put it on record here that i’ve backed Cork at 5/1, Tyrone at 20/1 and Armagh at 50/1.
Kerry or Dublin. I have no faith in the Cork footballers. Ditto for Kildare and Mayo.
I have tipped Kildare elsewhere and I’ll stick with that. I expect to make it 2 winning tips in succession having tipped Dublin on TFK last year before the championship started. I’m great that way. There will be no dark horses.
wonder will Walsh and Kenneally come back for Kerry later in the year?
Could be enough to swing another All Ireland their way.
Pretty open championship I reckon
I am tipping Cork.
The greatest GAA side of all time will win this - Tyrone.
Kerry but I would love to see Mayo finally come good, yesterday was a bit of a blow to those hopes, but I have faith in young Horan.
I read somewhere else that London will lose 12 players due to Congress changes introduced which stopped the Seanie Johnston transfer. Has that been mentioned already on here or could someone kindly explain it to me please?
I heard this mentioned around congress but was under the impression a by law would be introduced to that rule for players “overseas”. I would imagine this would surely come to pass. Very unfair if not. That Johnston is some UCOAM.
I will be rowing in behind Donegal and Kildare this season
There are six main contenders to win the All-Ireland as I see it:
Dublin - difficult job maintaing the same intensity and motivation as last year. Can’t see it happen. Quarter-final exit.
Cork - Curent No. 1 contender but have a tendency to be rather headless in crucial matches, question marks over the management’s tactical nous and ability to really get the best from the players. Frighteningly good when on form but they have rarely shown that in important championship matches. With Kildare the fittest and most physical team around. Will kill teams who can’t match them physically. Won’t be able to do that in an All-Ireland final though.
Kerry - still have the class, but a thinner squad than in the 2006-2009 period, very old defence which will be a year older and more vulnerable than ever to being caught out by a team with the ability to play with the highest intensity for 70 minutes, were caught out to a certain extent by Dublin’s superior fitness last year.
Tyrone - the most impressive team in the country so far in 2012 before yesterday but their veterans will be another year past their best and it might still be a year or two too soon for some of their younger players. They’ve had a few injury problems too with Coney out for the year. Difficult draw in Ulster and may struggle to get over Armagh in the Athletic Grounds.
Kildare - Will outlast most teams fitness-wise and appear to be getting a cleaner bill of health injury-wise than they’ve had for a while. Add Peter Kelly, Dermot Earley, Hugh Lynch, Mikey Conway and Padraig Fogarty to what was there last year and it makes a massive difference.
Mayo - A genuine contender but their ability to fuck things up should never be underestimated. Should improve again from last year but I think an improving Galway have a great chance of catching them out in Pearse Stadium, presuming they can get past Roscommon.
Down and Donegal lie in a group behind those six. Down have a great draw in Ulster and should walk into the final. I doubt McGuinness’s huns will be the same force they were last year.
Armagh, Galway and Derry all have an outside chance of reaching an All-Ireland semi-final with a bit of luck.
Went for Kildare in the 2012 predictions thread so will stay with them.
Finals:
All-Ireland: Kildare to beat Cork
Leinster: Kildare to beat Dublin
Munster: Cork to beat Limerick
Connacht: Galway to beat Mayo
Ulster: Down to beat Armagh
Quarter-Finalists:
Kildare
Cork
Galway
Down
Kerry
Dublin
Tyrone
Mayo
+1
If Leitrim’s campaign ends before September, I will be 100% behind the Mayo men
:lol:
Donegal are my second team this year. Tough draw in Ulster though.
:lol: 
Hoping for Wexford to have a good run and at the least have a serious crack at the Leinster title, but the All Ireland - Kildare for me, I’d love to see Johnny Doyle with a Celtic Cross, no more than he deserves. It’ll have to be this year though, with the Eircom sponsorship copying that of our glorious national association football team.
In saying that, I would prefer not to see more pictures of the bould Johnny like this
All-Ireland glory still fuels Doyle’s fire
Tadhg Fennin says the Lilywhite veteran is not one for wallowing in self-pity, writes MALACHY CLERKIN
LOST IN the tumbling cascade of Kildare’s All-Ireland quarter-final defeat to Donegal last July was a kooky little stat, the sort that makes you pause and rewind and play again a couple of times just to be sure. This was the day of Kevin Cassidy’s point at the death in extra-time, an afternoon of steel-beamed truth from two hard teams who were only separated after 101 minutes by a kick from the end of the world. The kind of finale that left no room for fine-comb scrutiny.
But trace your finger along the next day’s reports and it jumps out at you as if on springs. Johnny Doyle didn’t score for Kildare. He came off at the end of 70 minutes and rejoined the fray seven minutes into extra-time. It was his shot that came back off a post for Tomás O’Connor to score the square ball goal that wasn’t. But flags of green or white, there were none.
Against the name of almost anyone else, this would clearly not be noteworthy. But the sight of J Doyle with no figures in brackets after it just looks wrong, a typo made flesh. In fact, for the previous time it happened in a championship game, you have to go all the way back to August 28th, 2000 and a 0-15 to 2-6 defeat in the All-Ireland semi-final against Galway. Doyle was substituted after 56 minutes that day, sacrificed after John Finn’s sending-off left Michael Donnellan without a marker.
As a measure of his place in the world back then, it felt about right. It was his breakthrough championship summer and he’d failed to score in an earlier game against Louth already. He’d done his bit in the drawn Leinster final against Dublin and in the replay as well but when Mick O’Dwyer was in need of a forward he didn’t need for the endgame, Doyle was it. Gifted, willing, expendable.
Tadhg Fennin got one of Kildare’s goals that day, Dermot Earley the other.
Together, the three of them were the future, Doyle and Fennin the inside forwards and Earley the born midfielder. Crushed as they were in not making the All-Ireland final, they at least had the solace of a Leinster medal to take with them and build upon. Yet the occasional O’Byrne Cup aside, it was the last thing any of them won with Kildare.
“You win a Leinster early on,” says Fennin now, “you kind of think that you’ll win four or five more. And we never did that. A couple of Leinster finals got left behind us and you would look back at those and think that if a few small things had gone for us that we could have won another Leinster and after that who knows?
“But I think for Johnny, as time moves on, it will be the last few years that are hardest to take. The Donegal match last year, the Down match the year before – games that came down to tiny decisions and square balls and whatever else. He wouldn’t be one for wallowing in self-pity but those would have been tough to take. He’d shake it off after a week or so and get on with next year but how much longer that will last, it’s hard to know.
“You can’t go on forever.”
Maybe not, maybe so. Doyle is 34 now but he still has the lean and hungry look of the cross-country runner he was in his schooldays. This is a man, after all, whose father Harry played his last club game at the age of 52, a county league match for Allenwood one night when they were short on bodies.
At a time in his life when most players would be looking for a less-taxing job description, Doyle has reinvented himself as in inter-county midfielder over to fill the hole left by Earley’s intermittent absences. If the end is coming, he’s given no impression he’s in a hurry to meet it.
The past five seasons have been his best. Even if we take it purely on the numbers, the step up he’s made since 2007 has been boggling. Going into the summer of 2007, Doyle had played 28 championship games for Kildare and put together a total of 1-92. In the five summers since, he’s played 29 times for a total of 7-139. That’s a jump from an average of 3.4 points per game in the first half of his championship life to 5.5 in the second. Even allowing for the fact he wasn’t always the main free-taker in the early days, that’s still a remarkable bounce.
If they beat Tyrone tomorrow, he’ll finally get to lift a cup having been captain all the way through Kieran McGeeney’s reign. That said, Fennin isn’t convinced Kildare will be gunning for every last ball, with a little of the 10-day training camp in Portugal expected to be sitting in their legs.
In any case, an NFL Division Two medal isn’t going to change anyone’s life, least of all Doyle’s.
“Above all else,” says Fennin, “it’s the All-Ireland that’s keeping him going. Every new manager comes in with ideas and they need leaders to implement them. I think Kieran saw Johnny, who was there for so long, as a natural-born captain. And Johnny saw what Kieran was trying to do and saw a man who was only after the All-Ireland. There were a good few lads on that Kildare team who were waiting for a manager to come along with that sort of ambition and drive. Kieran made them believe it was possible. Johnny’s doing his level best to make sure he’s there for it.
“There are better players than Johnny Doyle who went through their whole career with Kildare without an All-Ireland medal in their back pocket but not many. And he’s determined not to be one of them. Guys just look up to him because of what he’s done. The scoring he’s done over the last number of years, his All Star, the way he’s regarded throughout the country. Guys follow that very easily. He’s Johnny Doyle, the main man. What he’s done precedes him.”
So he didn’t score against Donegal last July – so what? It didn’t affect his standing, didn’t lessen him in the eyes of anyone. When the last game of the league came down to the last kick of a ball and Kildare needed someone to nail a penalty and get them promoted, it was Doyle’s shuffling gait that came forward with the ball. Still gifted and just as willing as ever.
But expendable? Not for a long time now.
They’re sponsored by 3, not eircom
Stuck this in the Leitrim Football Thread but prob worth putting it here aswell
A new Croke Park law has effectively barred twelve of London’s players from the championship.
The Exiles’ championship preparations are up in smoke after the law was passed at Congress in Portlaoise, ruling that adoptive counties cannot field players who played club football in their home counties the previous year.
London have had a preliminary appeal of the ruling rejected but are set to mount another appeal.
Captain Sean McVeigh is one of those affected. The former Antrim player is enraged by the tightening of the transfer laws (reportedly in response to the Seanie Johnston saga), which leave him and eleven team-mates - all of whom were allowed to play in the league - ineligible to face Leitrim next month:
“This could affect us just as we are starting to make progress. A lot of us are annoyed,” he says in The Irish Daily Star.
"I don’t think overseas football has even been looked at. There’s been no compassion for us or compassion for people over in London.
“It’s going to absolutely destroy football in London in general, never mind this year.”
This is mental, especially in these austere times where emigration has risen. Its a shitty rule attempting to lock the gate after the horse has bolted. How can they be allowed to play in the league, but not the championship?
Reported on twitter that Benny Coulter has broken his ankle.