You can measure it in days – 5,418, to be exact, between defeats in the Leinster championship for Dublin. Or in matches if you like – from June 27th, 2010, to April 13th, 2025, Dublin played 43 Leinster championship games and won them all. Or you can tell the story in people either – before Sunday no current intercounty footballer in Leinster had beaten Dublin in a senior championship match.
Over time Dublin’s dominance of Leinster had become a kind of knotweed. It grew and stretched and formed a clump over the whole competition, leaving no room for anything else to grow. For a few seasons towards the back end of the 2010s, Graham Reilly of Meath was the answer to a quiz question as the only current non-Dublin player with a Leinster medal. Reilly retired at the end of the 2020 season.
The flipside was just as bracing. A full generation of Dublin players came and went without ever knowing the taste of defeat in Leinster football. Brian Fenton, Dean Rock, Jack McCaffrey, Paul Mannion and plenty more – they all lived out the length of their intercounty careers playing in Leinster matches where nobody was even checking the score most of the time. It goes without saying that of the team beaten by Meath on Sunday only Stephen Cluxton had ever lost a provincial match before.
It had all become so pointless. So hopeless. Hundreds of good, quality intercounty footballers passed through their stint in the jersey without ever considering that a provincial medal might be a step along the way. They might – might – find their way to a final but they’d be cannon fodder when they got there. The whole thing had become a box-ticking exercise.
And it will be again. We should remember that. In the giddy early morning aftermath of the Dublin beast finally being run through with a spear, it can’t be forgotten that this is presumably a blip. Dublin will regenerate and refresh. Meath – and everyone else – rejoiced in the previous win over them in 2010 on the basis that it was the first time Dublin had lost in Leinster for six seasons. It took a decade and a half to see their next defeat.
So the Dubs will be back and they will eat the Leinster championship whole once again when they return. We know that. The floor for Dublin football is just too high in comparison with the ceilings of the counties around them. Meath’s victory doesn’t change that. Unless and until the financial realities underpinning the football championship change, nothing will.
But those are worries for another day. In the here and now Meath’s win is nothing short of astonishing. There were straws in the wind, yes. Dublin’s form in the league and even in beating Wicklow had been mostly unconvincing.
Since losing Fenton and James McCarthy over the winter they’ve now played nine games and lost four. They’ve tried out four different goalkeepers. John Small didn’t return until their pre-championship training camp. It didn’t take a huge leap of logic to see them suffering in the championship.
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Still, though, nobody had them losing in Leinster. Least of all the people of Leinster. Their semi-final was moved out of Croke Park and still only attracted a shade over 10,000 people to Portlaoise. If there was a groundswell of confidence in Meath about their prospects on Sunday the vast majority of it clearly stayed in Meath and decided to watch it on GAA+. Or, probably more accurately, didn’t plan to tune in at all.
Getting the Dubs out of Croke Park for a Leinster semi-final is one thing – believing you can beat them once you’ve got them on neutral ground is entirely another. For all we go on about their record at HQ, this was the first time Dublin had lost a Leinster championship game outside Croke Park since 1981 – Laois 2-9 Dublin 0-11 in Tullamore, since you ask. So you’d readily forgive anyone who thought better of committing a Sunday afternoon to it.
When did that change, you wonder? Was it when news came through that Meath had gone six points up in the early exchanges? Or when word got around that Cluxton’s kick-outs were coming under siege, after Meath won seven of his first nine? Surely by the time Robbie Brennan’s side were 0-17 to 0-5 ahead at half-time the echoes had found even the most fatalistic Meath followers.
At this point it is worth noting the role the new rules had in Meath’s victory. A 12-point lead wouldn’t have been possible under the old ways. It isn’t just the two-pointers that are making the difference, it’s the kick-outs as well. When you have a wind at your back like Meath did in Portlaoise you can kick at the posts with abandon and still be confident that you have, at worst, a 50/50 chance of claiming the restart.
The result is a freeing up of teams whose first instinct under the old rules was always caution. The sample size is still very small so we can’t be drawing concrete conclusions just yet but it does seem to have given the middle-ranking teams far more of a chance against the elite ones. In the past fortnight Cork nearly nicked Kerry, Monaghan were a match for Donegal and Meath have beaten Dublin.
Meath have beaten Dublin! You’d nearly be inclined to write it out a thousand times just to be sure. Whatever happens from here the sport feels like a window has been opened.
