Take that, championship structure bores. In the space of eight days, any and all campaigns to get rid of the provincial championships have been fatally wounded. After pitch invasions in Castlebar and Clones, a few plucky Louth fans even managed to hot-step it onto the pitch at the end of this Leinster final at Croke Park. It wasn’t quite Plan B territory but the boys went home with a story all the same.
Louth are Leinster champions. The window that was opened by Meath’s win over Dublin in the semi-final didn’t just let fresh air into the stalest championship in the GAA, it let the red and white hordes from the north east in as well. From the hairy mountains around Cooley down to Drogheda’s urban sprawl, they have been waiting generations for this.
“Sixty-eighty years is a long time,” said Louth manager Ger Brennan afterwards. “And I’ve been up there now, it’s my second season and you get an appreciation of how much they love their football and how much they wanted it. And while I’m the fortunate one to be there at the moment in terms of someone to manage it, I have to give massive credit to the players.
“The amount of work that they put in, their enthusiasm to learn, their desire to get better –it’s just incredible, second to none. And it’s something I haven’t experienced before. They’re never happy. They just want more, we want more. Today was all about winning and we won. Luckily it was our turn to get over the line for the first time. That’s always a tricky one to win.”
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When we set out on this journey a number of years ago, for these players it was step by step, setback after setback
— Sam Mulroy
With the Louth fans in the 65,786 crowd bouncing in delirium, Sam Mulroy got up on the steps of the Hogan Stand and told everybody that the players had believed when nobody believed. A few years back, in one of the Covid years, Mulroy‘s 1-7 against Longford made him the only Louth scorer in a full season of championship football. From that to this is some feat of keeping on keeping on.
“I suppose it’s a case of, ‘What? Do we just keep going on? Playing like we don’t believe?’ You have to change something. If nothing changes, nothing changes. When we set out on this journey a number of years ago, for these players it was step by step, setback after setback.
“This group is very, very resilient. You’re just building, you’re stacking evidence every day that you can do something special. And obviously the lads came in and pushed us on even further. It’s just one of those things – why not us? That was in the back of my head the last number of years.”
When Brennan took over from Mickey Harte, you would have got astronomical odds on him overseeing a provincial crown before the man who had just left Louth in the lurch. But the former Dublin defender always kept his eyes looking forward. He even made sure to credit Harte among others in explaining how this had all happened.
Mostly though, he made it simple. In Louth, he saw a team on an upward curve. Brennan doesn’t deal in fairytales or wild swings. You look at what you have, you look at what you’re against, you go after it.
“Winning one is the hardest. Once you win one, you get to the top of the mountain and you see that you like it. You want more of it. You want to get as many of these experiences as you can while your playing career is still going.
“Belief is intrinsic. It’s spiritual. It’s psychological. But it’s also quite measured. When we look at the gym stats, the fitness stats, the shots-to-scores ratios, body fat. All these things can be measured. That which is measured gets done. And that’s something we would be quite good on from a scientific point of view. So if the lads don’t want to go on to win more, that’s their call. But we’ll go on and try and win a few more, will we?”
“We’ll do our best,” laughed Mulroy, seated to his right.
You can laugh and joke like that when you’ve won. Robbie Brennan wasn’t much for laughing when he came to see the press, but he couldn’t have been more magnanimous in defeat. Mulroy‘s last free was a killer, given for what looked like an innocuous tackle on Conal McKeever. Brennan didn’t want to make a big deal of it but he couldn’t let it pass when asked about it.
“Yeah, straight out, disappointed,” the Meath manager said. “It’s on the TV, you can see it’s not a foul. But listen, they’re fine margins and we said it at half-time, the one percent margins as the rugby boys will always say is what you need to go after.
“And a few of them fell Louth’s way but that’s not to take away from how well they played. Listen, we’re frustrated with some of them, but I’m sure we got a couple that bounced our way as well. You have to go with it.”
