Preventing a record 12-game losing streak on Sunday key to igniting Kildare's summer hopes

When Kildare bound onto the field on Sunday for their Leinster Championship opener it will be just three weeks shy of a year since the Lilywhites last won a competitive game of football. Cian O’Neill and his players need no reminding of that – indeed they were pretty much reminded of it before and after every game from the midway point of this year’s National Football League when the statistics became more and more stark.

12 long months of enduring defeats, some agonising, some embarrassing and some heartening. The context of those losses have to be considered in any evaluation, and the success that Kildare enjoyed in the first two years of O’Neill’s reign has almost hindered them due to the level they built themselves up to.

Promotion to Division 1 came perhaps a year earlier than O’Neill would have wanted or expected, but when Kildare were in the position to make the jump from Division 2 there was nobody claiming that it was a bad thing. A young team with oodles of potential playing the likes of Dublin, Kerry and Mayo would not be sniffed at, and in many of the games so far this year the Lilies have shown themselves capable of making the step up. Perhaps the inexperience of the team was the downfall in narrow defeats to Monaghan, Tyrone and Donegal, but those losses shattered confidence and ensured that Kildare were roundly beaten in games against Mayo, Kerry and Galway.

Looking back on statistics on the excellent Kildaregaa365 website, this has been the joint longest losing streak in Kildare football history. The last time that Kildare lost 11 games on the spin was from June 1980 to October 81, a run that spanned across two championship campaigns and one league. That is almost identical to this current spiral. Another loss on Sunday would make this the longest run ever.

When Kildare eventually came out of that funk in November 1981 they were in Division 2, where they would win just two games that season and draw a further two in the league. Followers of the boys in white will be desperate that such a scenario is not repeated on this occasion.

Many pundits around the country have been busy talking up Carlow’s chances ahead of this Sunday, and quite rightly too. Carlow are ‘rising’, haven’t you heard? Bookmakers will be inundated with bets on Carlow to win at 7/1, and, to be fair, those odds are tempting when you consider that this is a team who have gained promotion in the league this year on the back of their best ever championship run and have also enjoyed a superb win over Louth in the opening round.

That said, Kildare are quite rightly going into this game as favourites because they simply have better players than Carlow. Much depends on the clash of the two styles, with Kildare’s free-flowing attacking style very contrasting to Carlow more defensive and suffocating approach. Kildare are not a team that has dealt too well with such defensive systems in the recent past, and Turlough O’Brien will undoubtedly be pinning his hopes on strangling the life from the Lilywhites.

The mantra for Kildare ahead of Sunday is that one win could change it all and light the touch paper on their summer ambitions. What those ambitions are can be debated, but the first goal on the horizon is to roar back against the ‘Carlow rising’ and end a losing streak that has gone on for far too long.