Hill 16 was a still blue sea for much of yesterday afternoon and there was an undercurrent of grief in the Dublin camp afterwards.

Tommy Carr's first words were in the Kildare dressing-room, with accolades as well as advice forthcoming. "You guys should enjoy this more than any game in your life," he told them. "But concentrate on the next one. You'll be very sad men if you go out between now and the Leinster final."

Plenty of very sad men in blue shirts. With Paul Curran carried off and Dessie Farrell sent off, only Carr dared to offer any sort of explanation. "It just didn't happen out there today. I suppose it was something similar to the last day but it's difficult to judge the game at this moment. We'll have to go back and take a closer look at what went wrong.

"The wind was a factor and there were a lot of wides on both sides. We should have made more use of it in the second half because we owned the ball for the first 15 minutes there and we just didn't convert. Probably our scoring conversion rate more than the wind was our big problem.

"We'll have to sit back and see what lessons we can learn from this game. At the moment we have to cope with the disappointment."

The positional changes created something of a makeover from the team of a fortnight ago, yet the loose passing and ultimate disintegration remained. "We'd given a lot of thought to our team and, obviously, Kildare, and we felt that from the last day we were obviously under pressure to try and do something so we digged (sic) around as much as we could," Carr said.

"I don't think we lost heart at any stage but maybe a little bit of panic set in and we stopped playing to our pattern. Certainly we got stuck in a few places and Kildare looked to be the hungrier team at the right time in the game."

The future, it appears, is still blowing in the Croke Park wind. "We made a conscious decision at the beginning of the year to go with the panel. Players need to make their own decision about what comes next. A lot of them have been on the road a long time. We need to sit down and look at things to decide what sort of Dublin team will come out in the autumn."