Brian Flanagan and Kildare U-20s seeking to right final wrongs

Brian Flanagan’s side came into this year’s championship with a big billing. With a handful of survivors from the team that reached the 2022 All-Ireland final and decent league form that saw them beat Kerry and draw with Dublin, that defeat to Westmeath came as a shock.

But ahead of this afternoon’s final showdown with Sligo in Cavan, Flanagan acknowledges that defeat was the making of them.

“Obviously, in the moment you were very disappointed because you’ve just lost a championship game,” Flanagan recalled.

“Any time with a loss you probably reflect an awful lot more on what went wrong, why did it go wrong? You look at the preparation and think, ‘Did I miss that? Could I have done something differently?’ So you learn so much more. I know it’s a bit of a cliché but you do learn so much more in defeat and I think that defeat actually in hindsight came at the perfect time for us.

“We didn’t have a huge amount of league games coming into it, so we didn’t have great...not that we didn’t have good form, but we didn’t have a huge amount of form. So that loss challenged us, it challenged the lads individually and I did get a sense pretty quickly after that game that the players very much wanted to respond and very much wanted to keep their championship alive and to get back to where we believed we could be.

“So, like I said, in hindsight it was probably the best thing that could have happened to us because it changed things around. I think we had six changes going in to play Wexford a week later. We got some level of a performance in that and then we just built from there.”

Kildare’s progression at underage level has gathered pace. Of the last five Leinster minor competitions, they’ve been in three finals, winning one and they are also just one win away from making the 2023 decider.

Across the same time period, they’ve won three provincial U-20 titles as well as the 2018 All-Ireland title. Today could see them take another step.

“I think there’s been huge work put in at underage, at school’s level. In terms of development squads, everything. Right from minor up to U-20.

“The effort is one thing, we’ve actually got results in the last couple of years. If you go back over the last five or six years we obviously had a very successful U-20 team in 2018, Naas CBS at schools level have brought through consistent winners, certainly at Leinster level.

“We’re obviously in our second final in a row now, so I think that layering of underage of success creates a conveyor belt of talent into your senior squad. I think it’s important that it’s consistent and I think it’s important that it keeps going in order for the Kildare senior team to be successful and have the type of players that’s needed coming in on a regular basis.

“I think success at underage that’s a once-off, there’s a lot of pressure on them lads then to deliver at senior level as one group as opposed to when you have a layering of success. I think it just means numbers, depth, and probably an almost culture at underage in Kildare of winning things now which is very healthy.”

Kildare lost out to Tyrone in last year’s final. To go one better they’ll have to face a Sligo team that have taken out Roscommon, Mayo, Galway and Kerry to reach this final. Whatever happens in Kingspan Breffni, Flanagan is hopeful Kildare are moving in the right way.

“I just think Kildare football is going in the right direction and these U-20s are going to help that. But there is a big step-up and Kildare will have to be patient with these lads over the next few years because from an S&C and physicality point of view there is a huge step to go from playing U-20 championship to senior championship. We may need to take our time with these lads but certainly Kildare is going in the right direction.”

Sligo v Kildare, Live, TG4, 1.30