O’Dowd: Very pleasing performance

Mick O’Dowd preferred to dwell on the positives rather than the fact Meath’s 12-point lead was twice cut to four in the final 12 minutes of normal time.

Kildare fired over seven points in 15 minutes, the last four of them coming in just two minutes, as Meath, so superb in the third quarter, blew hard.

O’Dowd accepted it was a concern but stressed the more significant point was the clinical manner in which his team became a dot on the horizon to Kildare.

“It was a good performance, I think. We prepared very well. We were very confident and very focused in what we had to do and we executed it pretty well.

“I thought there probably were times in the second half when Kildare got on top and we weren’t doing as much as we needed to do in terms of tackling and stuff like that but overall, the performance was very pleasing.”

Accepting some of his players were running out of steam in the final 15 minutes, O’Dowd put down Kildare’s strong but ultimately vain revival down to the impact of their replacements.

“I would look at the impact their subs made. And when we were introducing subs... it’s a delicate thing. Fellas may be getting the better of a man and is going very well and that man is taken off and you’re wondering do you replace fresh with fresh.

“So it’s always a delicate balancing act. But overall I thought the opening quarter of the second half was where we probably won the game.”

A third Leinster final in as many years for Meath mightn’t be described as progress but it’s consistency and O’Dowd is looking for his charges to push on now.

“I would look at it as a second final in-a-row for us,” he said in reference to his spell at the helm.

“But for the county it’s a third final in-a-row. I think what we’ll look for is a better performance. We gave a 55 minutes performance the last day, we’ll be looking for a 72-minute performance the next day and see where that brings us.”

O’Dowd reported that Mickey Newman should be fit for the Leinster final, while he indicated Kevin Reilly’s injury wasn’t too serious.

“He looked like he wanted to stay on the pitch but that would be Kevin anyway. But we got him off because he was struggling.”