Second ever trip to St Conleth's for table-toppers Galway

After a welcome two-week break to recharge the bodies and minds, Brian Dowling’s Kildare are back in Leinster Senior Hurling Championship action this weekend with table-topping Galway coming to Cedral St Conleth’s Park for only the second time in their history on Saturday (3.30 pm).

The Tribesmen were due in Newbridge in January for the Walsh Cup opening round, but the weather put paid to that fixture, so you have to go back to 1976 for the last occasion the sides met on Kildare soil.

That Division 1B league game was one of five clashes between the counties between 1971 and 1980, three in the league and two in the All-Ireland series. Outside of that ten-year period, the sides have never met.

Unsurprisingly, Galway won all five of those fixtures, though they only scraped through by two points (1-11 to 1-9) in that 1976 clash in Newbridge.

Kildare had dominated the first half and turned around 0-7 to 1-2 ahead but had squandered a number of goal chances.

Galway, All-Ireland finalists against Kilkenny the year before, and Liam McCarthy winners four years later, eventually wore Kildare down with their higher quality stickwork and sharpshooter PJ Molloy gave them the lead late on with another PJ, Qualter, adding the final score.

If that name sounds familiar, Qualter provides a link to Saturday’s match with his grandson David a key member of the Kildare panel, though injury looks set to rule the young man out for the remainder of the campaign in a major blow to Dowling.

Cian Boran is another expected absentee after his appendix operation two weeks ago that forced him out of the defeat to Dublin. Whether Dowling can call upon either James Burke or Cathal Dowling we’ll have to wait and see. Both were named among the four standby players for the trip to Parnell Park.

After their impressive opener against Wexford in Newbridge, Kildare found the going a little tougher in Parnell Park but margins of eight and eleven points in those two outings are by no means embarrassing (after all Wexford went down by seventeen to Kilkenny) but the biggest difficulty for Kildare or any McDonagh Cup winners coming up to this level is the sheer relentlessness of the challenges they face.

After Saturday, Kildare go to Nowlan Park to face the black and amber just seven days later before finishing their campaign at home to Offaly another eight days later.

Few will expect anything other than a comfortable Galway win on Saturday. The Tribesmen were highly impressive in hammering Kilkenny by fifteen points (3-25 to 1-16) in Salthill in the opening round and followed that up with eleven points to spare (2-26 to 1-18) over Offaly.

Manager Micheál Donoghue felt the latter performance left a lot to be desired, though, and will be conscious that Kildare have put up their best performances on home turf in St Conleth’s Park this season, going toe to toe with Clare and beating Antrim and Carlow in the league before giving Wexford a good rattle for long spells in the championship opener.

For Kildare to threaten an upset they will have to find their best form for seventy plus minutes, a huge challenge at this level. They won’t be able to afford the lull that saw Dublin move from level-pegging to nine points ahead in the eleven minutes before the break the last day.

It would be natural for Kildare to focus more and more on the Offaly game in the final round as their main chance of salvation, though given their respective performances it is not beyond the realms of possibility that the Faithful move out of sight of Kildare with a win over the Yellow Bellies on Saturday week.

Kildare need to find a win from somewhere, but, realistically, it would be one of the great shocks in hurling history if that were to come on Saturday.