Long route holds no fears now for battle-hardened Kildare
In 2008, Fennin’s ten-year stint with the county side was drawing to a close and, as the longest day of the year came and went, it seemed to be a good time to be getting out after relegation to Division Two and a disastrous championship loss to Wicklow.
No-one held out much hope of redemption in the qualifiers. Kildare had been a reluctant traveller through the back door since its inception. They won their first assignment, against Donegal in 2001, but then lost seven of nine and alternated narrow defeats by the likes of Sligo and Offaly with blowouts against Kerry and Derry.
Yet, this weekend they face Derry in the fourth round and defending an unbeaten record in four years under Kieran McGeeney in the same system that had given them so much grief for so long.
The turning point? “It was the first qualifier we played under Kieran,” says Fennin. “It was against Cavan in Newbridge after that Wicklow game. Seanie Johnston scored a point in injury-time to put them two up and it looked like we had blown it but James Kavanagh scored a goal to win. Who knows where we would be now if James hadn’t got that goal? We’ve never looked back in terms of the qualifiers. That was the catalyst for everything since.”
What they have done since is beat Limerick, Fermanagh, Wicklow, Antrim (after a replay), Leitrim, Derry, Monaghan, Laois and Meath which has taken them to two All-Ireland quarter-finals and the last four in 2009.
Earlier Kildare teams that Fennin played on were never far away but never close enough. Four qualifiers were lost by a combined total of eight points and they fell short in the 2002 and 2003 Leinster finals against Dublin and Laois by two and three respectively. So many close encounters boil down to more than bad luck.
“There was a small bit more to it than that. Maybe our mentality at the time was ‘Leinster or bust’ and it was very hard psychologically to turn that around in your head for the qualifiers.
“We probably never believed we were capable of winning the All-Ireland outright so when we did go out of Leinster there maybe a sense that that was it for us. We could never separate the two competitions like the lads now seem able to do. They seem happy enough to be getting on with the qualifiers. They have such a high level of fitness they’re not worried about the high volume of games and they don’t seem to care about the press saying they haven’t beaten a Division One team yet.”
