GAELIC GAMES:IT'S HARD not to feel sorry for Mick O'Dwyer on days like this. A few weeks short of his 75th birthday, his lifelong enthusiasm for football has hardly ever been questioned. Yet at some stage during the second half of this largely inept Wicklow display he must have been wondering what he was doing there, perhaps questioning himself if he still has the stomach for it all.

“Yeah we’d be very disappointed,” was O’Dwyer’s first assessment, although he later turned to a friend and described the performance as “shocking”. On the record, he admitted: “The football wasn’t great. I don’t think neutrals would have thought much of it. But I’d say Kildare are happy enough.

“We played well enough in the first half, and we’re still in the game. But things really didn’t happen for us in the second half. But Kildare are in good shape. Their full-back line really got on top of our forwards. We were played out of it at midfield. Kildare were way sharper than us, and yet we were only beaten by seven points, which is amazing really because Kildare were so dominant in the second half.”

For now O’Dwyer will stay true to his cause, and see out the last of his four years with Wicklow: “I’m with them until the season is over and I am gone then.”

For Kildare manager Kieran McGeeney the only hard question was why his team shot so many wides (17), especially as they were never really under pressure. “Well Wicklow used their three full forwards quite well in the first half . . .,” he started, “but I think once our full-back line went about stopping them we went a long way towards stopping their scoring threat. We got the ball well up into our forwards, but just need to get our shooting boots on next time. I’m a lot happier than I was against Tyrone (in the league), when they weren’t taking any shots. You have to shoot, and the first day of the championship you’re going to be nervous.”

And Meath next – as in a reportedly disjointed Meath camp? “Well it depends. Sometimes things like that can galvanise a team. All we can do is looking after our own team.”