Kildare juniors Leinster Champions 2013

Best of luck to all involved tonight. Hopefully with a bit of luck we can bring a long awaited All-Ireland back to the county.

best of luck lads

Good luck to the Juniors tonight. Fingers crossed we'll have an Ireland this year...

Unfortunately more of the same from Kildare. We're getting ever closer to 50 years without an All Ireland in any football grade. Cork are really strong at this level and their midfield dominance and a good spread of attacking talent proved too much. To be fair the lads made a right game of it in the second half but as with the Tyrone match in senior the momentum seemed to swing as soon as we dragged ourselves level. A lot of turnover ball (hard to criticise too much in the conditions) and poor shot selection contributed to our downfall. In spite of it all we could have won if we had cooler heads. Didn't see too much material out there for the senior team although Burke at full back was tidy and Cribben and Hanafin in particular tried hard to drive us on.
But overall you couldn't say we deserved to win. That's 8 All Ireland finals in a row we've lost since 1965 by my reckoning:

1 Senior (98)
1 Minor (73)
3 u-21 (66,76,08)
3 junior (70,11,13)

Even in 1970 when we managed to beat Cork in the Home Final we went and lost to London in the Final proper.

The lot of a Lillywhite is not a glorious one..

It's not - hard luck lads. Time for me to take the flag down from its place in this exiled home.

p.s. I forgot to add it's all Geezer's fault!

You got in there before me crofter. 
Hard luck to the lads if they had of played in the first half like they did in the second they probably would have won!
Luck never shines Kildare's way  
But We will come back for more next year it will be Kildare's day lads one day.
Keep the faith Cill Dara abu  

Just to build on Crofter's point, since 1965 Kildare have won 23 Leinster championships at senior, minor, under 21 and junior. And no All Ireland.

Fair play to the lads yesterday for getting to a final. A shame it was the same old story with the wides and the missed chances. Must have been in the region of 14 wides over the whole game and 4 or 5 dropped shots and saves in the first half.

I only counted 9 wides but that is partly a reflection on how far the game was being played away from the Cork goal in the first half in particular. In the second half when we had turned the tide in our direction for around 10 or 15 minutes we were let down by momentum-breaking misses, generally where we took on shots that weren't really on. Cork were more clinical when they had their spell of dominance in the first half and again late on when the game needed to be won.
All in all they had a better midfield, more clinical forwards and their defence coped relatively easily with a disappointing Kildare forward division. When you look at all that we relied on the goal to keep ourselves in touch and can have few arguments with the result.

That's a good stat about the number of Leinsters won with no All Ireland to follow. I'd say only Mayo could come close to that.

I reckon its time to put Jim Clarke back in the kildare job! Sure he's our last winning all Ireland Manager! All jokes aside its worrying when we can't seem to be able to get over the line at All Ireland stage. We actually could have won solely on the wide count yesterday! Winning titles has to start at underage level, where it can be bred into them.

Somewhat longer report on the game than you'll find in the nationals:

http://gaascores.com/2013/08/report-all-ireland-junior-football-final-cork-0-13-kildare-1-7/

Hard luck lads. It took us too long to get going and when we did we missed too many chances. Not the first time that has happened to a Kildare team.

Hopefully Dermot Finn and all the eligible players will give it another go next year. We've got to keep believing and we'll make the breakthrough some day soon.