Kildare will get one shot at Leinster and be put right back in their box, Dowling will leave and the whole show will fall apart.
Thatâs how it always works for these counties.
Itâs always âthereâs great work going on in county Xâ, county X gets promoted, gets their one or if theyâre very lucky two years in the Leinster round robin, maybe get one decent result, usually a draw against Wexford or Dublin, they get relegated, the manager leaves, thatâs the end of it, and the next county has their turn on the merrygoround.
Itâll be harder again from now on for teams to get two years in Leinster because Offaly are back in it.
The gap is just too great. The Kildare public arenât going to come out in numbers either. Theyâll probably pull 3-4k if theyâre at home to Kilkenny or Dublin but they wonât go close to filling Newbridge.
Long term with demographics the population in Kildare is only going to increase. They are miles ahead of Meath in that tier 3 section to get up to tier 1 level in the next 20 years.
I just donât see hurling ever being loved in the county. They had so few fans there today it was ridiculous. Maybe itâs not a GAA county, they had fuck all for the semi final of the Leinster football either
Itâs not about population though. Look at Dublin.
If it was about population Kildare would be cleaning up in football. People have been predicting Kildare as the next football superpower for years based on population. If you go back to 1998 when they reached the All-Ireland final and had massive support for a decade that looked not just realistic but likely. Yet bar three or four years under the great Kieran McGeeney, theyâve been crap for the last 25 years.
Public interest is everything. Kildare is a football county in GAA terms and support for the Kildare footballers has been plumbing the depths since McGeeney left. To the Kildare public the relative success of their hurling team will be an afterthought. Theyâll just think âoh nice, the hurling team won their competitionâ, and carry on with their lives without giving it any further thought.
Somebody here said something about Kildare recently that it was the county with the least sense of county identity. Theyâd probably be in the bottom two or three anyway. Itâs a quare county, very middle class in large parts of it, but thereâs a weird ju-ju about other parts of the county, places like Monasterevin, Athy, the housing estates around the Curragh and those places out beyond Clane, Prosperous (if ever there was an inaccurately named place) and Allenwood and Rathangan. Even though both are suburban counties Kildare wouldnât have near as strong a county identity as Meath would.
Always associated Prosperous with the magic that Planxty produced. It was Christy Moores second album called Prosperous after his home place, where he brought the soon to be Planxty members together.
Is it because there is a shitload of people living there from somewhere else, so they donât really care about a Kildare identity. It just happens to be a place where they can afford to live.
They field very few adult hurling teams - 8 for U20 & 30 total for senior/inter/junior. Those numbers donât capture everything but as a rough gauge of where hurling is in a county it gives you an idea.
I presume Kildare have a good crew of players from that team who beat Wexford at U20 in 2021? The likes of Richie Lawlor and Cian Molloy played that day for Wexford. Corey Byrne Dunbar whoâs on the senior panel as well.
Celbridge and leixlip arent really middle class as such. Not many big council estates but plenty dub taxi driver, tradesmen types who wouldnât be what youâd think of as middle class. Neither place is in any way âposhâ.