THERE WAS A camera shot last Sunday that was emblematic of Kildare’s limp League campaign at St Conleth’s Park.
With 53 minutes on the clock, as Derry top-scorer Shane McGuigan turned over another Kildare attack, the camera cut away from the Oak Leafers passing the ball around at the back.
It first showed the scoreboard: Derry 2-12, Kildare 0-3.
The director then cuts to the enterprising cameraman recording Kildare fans trickling out of St Conleth’s Park.
They would cut back to that shot twice more in the next dozen minutes, the trickle becoming a flood.
The welcome redevelopment of St Conleth’s Park will begin at the end of this month but to avoid an unhappy exit, Kildare football needs a facelift on the field too.
Last Sunday’s 14-point demolition by Derry followed a near-identical 13-point hammering by Cork at their home venue last month.
On both occasions, the Lilywhites scored just seven points. Against Derry, only two of those came from open play.
But for Neil and Daniel Flynn sparking 14-man Kildare to an unlikely comeback victory away to Clare, they could well be pointless at the foot of Division 2 alongside Limerick.
Kildare have got their house in order off the field over the last decade. Having once needed a €300,000 cash injection from Croke Park to pay the bills, last year’s county convention reported a surplus of €1.1m.
Those savings have helped to revive the St Conleth’s Park project after Covid and spiralling construction costs put it in jeopardy.
Their Hurling Action Plan appears to be bearing fruit too, with their hurlers poised to compete for promotion to Division 1 this spring.
Their U20 footballers won the 2018 All-Ireland under high-flying Roscommon manager Davy Burke, with seven further provincial titles won between that grade and minor across the past decade.
But their highest-profile team has been flatlining so far this campaign.
With Division 3 relegation and Sam Maguire participation now at stake, manager Glenn Ryan, who is assisted by an all-star backroom team of Kildare legends in Anthony Rainbow, Dermot Earley, Johnny Doyle, and Brian Lacey, has pointed to training ground work not translating to weekend play.
“The reality is we train each week, we analyse games, and we try to improve from game to game and if we don’t improve from game to game, we’re going to regress. And I would say this was a regression from last week,” Ryan said after the Cork loss.
“We work on stuff off the training pitch in the hope and the belief that it’s going to be brought out on the playing pitch but it’s not happening,” he conceded after the Derry defeat.
Kildare had 40 attacks into the Derry 45 that day but their aimlessness couldn’t have been more evident.
They converted just 30% of their 23 shots, with shot selection a glaring issue. Three times in a row Ben McCormack ballooned ambitious shots wide from 45 metres out. He wasn’t the only offender.
Their build-up play was far too impatient. Three times in the first 14 minutes they lost possession over the sideline or endline as Derry effectively employed the narrow pitch as an auxiliary defender.
St Conleth’s Park will be widened and lengthened as part of the redevelopment but that won’t remove the blind alleys and dead ends Kildare kept finding last week.
Paddy McDermott provided two of their most incisive attacks, one featuring a header as he soloed the ball forward and the other ending in a point, but both were one-off runners. There was little evidence of direction or team interplay.
Twice more outside-of-the-boot shots were skewed wide, while their luck was summed up when Darragh Kirwan, with Derry on the back foot, managed to hop the ball off the heel of the retreating opposition full-back and it ricocheted away to safety.
After the flop, the Kildare Nationalist headline read ‘Fortress Conleth becomes playground for visitors’.
Who could argue?
The ‘Newbridge or Nowhere’ defiance is nowhere to be seen.
That may well be what’s needed heading into three relegation four-pointers against Mickey Harte’s Louth [today, 2pm], Limerick, and Meath – that final game the only opportunity to rectify their St Conleth’s Park collapses before the old ground calls it a day.