Live GAA updates: Kildare and Limerick contest Tailteann Cup final, Kerry meet Tyrone in All-Ireland semi-final
All-Ireland SFC semi-final: Kerry v Tyrone, Croke Park, 5pm
Tailteann Cup final: Kildare v Limerick, Croke Park, 2.30pm
Key Reads
Dean Rock: Tyrone need to try something unexpected to shock Kerry
Denis Walsh: Jack O'Connor keeps making his case in Kerry court of opinion
Malachy Clerkin: Forget burning tricolours and immigrant effigies, Croke Park is where our culture is this weekend
Seán Moran: Tyrone need to produce more to threaten Kerry
Johnny Doyle: 'One point to spare for Kildare will do me and we'll all go home happy then.'
1 minute ago
Kildare v Liemrick are first up. Here are the teams named during the week. No word of any changes yet anyway.
Kildare
: Cian Burke; Harry O'Neill, Ryan Burke, Brian Byrne; Tommy Gill, David Hyland, James McGrath; Kevin Feely, Brendan Gibbons; Colm Dalton, Alex Beirne, Callum Bolton; Ryan Sinkey, Darragh Kirwan, Daniel Flynn.
Subs
: Didier Cordonnier, Jack McKevitt, Mark Dempsey, Mick O'Grady, Kevin Flynn, Aaron Masterson, Rian Teahan, Darragh Swords, Brian McLoughlin, Niall Kelly, Eoin Cully.
Limerick
: Josh Ryan; Jason Hassett, Darren O'Doherty, Mark McCarthy; Killian Ryan, Iain Corbett, Tony McCarthy; Tommie Childs, Darragh O'Hagan; Paul Maher, Cillian Fahy, Danny Neville; Emmet Rigter, James Naughton, Peter Nash.
Subs
: Jeffrey Alfred, Cormac Woulfe, Tadgh O Siochru, Conall O Duinn, Barry Coleman, Sean Clancy, Diarmuid Buckley, Darragh Murray, Rory O'Brien, Andrew Meade, Rob Childs.
2 hours ago
Four games left in the intercounty football summer and 50 per cent of them are on in Croke Park today. First up, Kildare take on Limerick in the Tailteann Cup final, woth throw-in at 2.30. Later, at five o'clock, it's Tyrone v Kerry in the All-Ireland semi-final. We'll be with you well into the evening, by which time the temperature will hopefully have dipped to something a bit less Saharan.
It's a hot one!
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Irish Daily Mirror
an hour ago
- Irish Daily Mirror
Meath win stirred my soul again, but I won't be a supporting them in Croke Park
LIKE an old pitman descending into the gaping mouth of a coal mine, Liam Hayes clocks in for our conversation, grabs his pick and lamp and stoically lowers himself into the deepest tunnels of a complex mind. At 63, the former Meath footballer and ex-award-winning sports writer remains compelling, introspective, self-aware, the custodian of what he calls a 'mad brain', one that facilitates a refreshingly off-piste way of thinking. Excavating private thoughts, chiselling into parts of the psyche where most fear to tread, exposing old wounds, walking towards the showers of black rain which occasionally pass through his head, decoding his fears and regrets, unlocking doors to his innermost self and inviting you across the threshold, Hayes is a slave to his own brutal honesty. We've known each other almost 40 years. We soldiered together on the sports beat in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I'd like to think we were friends. Some of the more thoughtful, profound but also - and this is a part many miss about Liam - fun nights I've had were over Chinese meals and beers on what were then Five Nations nights in Paris, London, Edinburgh and Cardiff. Though this is our first direct contact in maybe a decade, it feels like picking up a conversation in mid-sentence. Across our 65-minute chat, Hayes is a superior, Ballon d'Or-quality interviewee. Trusting, presenting the gift of unedited thoughts. An open book, we veer across a rainbow of topics: mortality, social inhibition, wanderlust, cancer, the joy of grandkids, life regrets, how the passing years have gifted him a new way of viewing the man in the shaving mirror. Why one of the pilot lights of Sean Boylan's first great team hasn't been to a Meath game in almost two decades and, why, though it has given him immense solace to find the Royal class of 2025 again stirring his blood, he won't be anywhere near Croke Park tomorrow for the county's first All-Ireland semi-final in 16 years. 'No, but I feel a bit guilty. I'm semi-retired from any interviews or PR activity. Obviously I'm more than happy to talk to you, but I've kept my nose out everything. I know if the young lads on the team are reading me saying I don't go to Meath games or if I had read that back in my day, I would have said 'f**k him, what does he know. He's got some attitude.' 'Because when you are in the middle of it, you think it's life and death and the most important thing in the world. This summer already I've been driving in the opposite direction to thousands of Meath cars on match days because I'm going home to my senior mother in Skryne. And in those moments, I feel no guilt whatsoever. 'It just goes out of your blood. You are interested in the lads and you wish them the best and this summer it has been brilliant to see. Any time they are on the TV I'll watch them, but you wouldn't drag me to Croke Park. 'If you paid me 10 grand you wouldn't get me to Croke Park next Sunday. I know that sounds awful and please, mind me here, because I don't want to sound like I'm up my own arse. I'm truly not being disrespectful. 'It's a mental thing. When you are involved like we were in the day, you are living and breathing it, like its 24/7 for 10 or 12 years. Nothing else is important in life. And then when it ends, it ends with a bang, a crashing steel door and it's over. 'And you're out of it. Then you go through four or five or six years, and this is true for every sportsperson, when you don't know whether you are coming or going. You feel guilty and you feel dispassionate and you hope they lose all their matches because you are not part of it. You feel selfish and all these horrible emotions. 'Then you come through that and you say 'you know what, I may as well become a supporter or not.' 'And you know what, I'm not going to become a supporter. I wish them the very best, but I'm not going to trail all over Ireland watching the team, I can't do that. I don't think many (ex-players) do that to be honest with you. 'Ah Jaysus, I'm not trying to be up my own arse, but you just go into a different place mentally where you say 'okay, I went through all of that, it's over.' Hayes has written and spoken with extraordinary eloquence about finding his brother Gerard, with whom he shared a bedroom for 20 years, dead at the GAA field in Skryne next to the family home after his elder sibling took his own life. Forty years on he was able to recall how he 'ran far and fast away. I was devastated by it. I don't think I have every fully recovered from it.' He doesn't make the link during our chat, but the suspicion is that such an horrendously traumatic experience has shaped much of his character, influenced and perhaps stymied other friendships, contributed to him being what he calls 'an outlier.' An All-Ireland winner in 1987 and 1988, captain of the team that emerged from that four-game epic that brought a jackhammer pulse to the summer of 1991, he sees little of most of the players with whom he authored history. 'Yeah you see I don't do reunions. I don't do school reunions. I've never done business reunions, I've done one Meath reunion in 30 years. I don't know why. It's something I'm not good at, it's a weakness of the mind, something in my psyche that I just don't like doing reunions. It's not a strength, I'm not proud of it. I just don't do them. It's a social inhibition. 'I think the older you get the more you realise how many issues you have had all your life. And it's good to deal with them. My family hate me saying this, but I think everyone is on the spectrum. We all have our problems, our issues. 'There's some reason why I don't do reunions. And I don't know what it is. I just don't do them. It's something you'd like to find out more about and discover why. 'I finally did a counselling session a couple of years back and found it very interesting. I was due to do six, but I never went back after the first one. 'When you are in that dressing room, it's all emotion and high-octane. You are this big band of brothers. You are all just ordinary individuals with not that much in common, so why would you want to do reunions. I'm not sure why you would want to do them. 'Gerry (McEntee, his long-time midfield partner back when they were kings) phoned me the other day. 'He said, 'We are all going down to Royal Tara, 15 or 16 of the lads, we are playing nine holes. What are you at?' 'I said 'nothing' so he asked me to come down with him. Gerry would be good at that. Gerry would always try to get me involved. We were buddies in the middle of the field. We would be buddies. I said, 'no' 'He said, 'You don't have to play golf, just come down for a pint with the lads and a bite to eat.' 'Again, I said, 'no.' Friday night is a big night for me, an important night, I'm not going to share it. It would be lovely to meet the lads for three or four hours, but you decide in you heard that you are not going to do that. 'Sean Boylan had a big 80th birthday, there were about 5,000 people at it, but I didn't get an invite. Rourkey had a 65th or a retirement gig and I didn't get an invite. For half a second after I heard about the latter, I was a bit put out. 'But I think both of them knew, I wouldn't have wanted to go. So they didn't invite me. They were actually being kind to me. . I think they know who I am.' The interactions he does have - walks with the great corner-back Bob O'Malley and McEntee - are typically profound. 'When Bob and I meet up, it's not a handshake, it's a hug, a big hug, full of meaning. We talk about life, mortality, politics, Ukraine, Gaza, anything and everything. But football just wouldn't come up in conversation.' Mortality invaded Hayes's private space in 2010. Diagnosed with Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma, he spent much of the next decade in and out of St. James's Hospital, undergoing chemotherapy and radiotherapy. The experienced altered his view about both life and death. 'I was afraid, fearful at the start. But the older you get to 63 and you see so many people dying. 'When you get to mid 60s, you think you should have another 10 years left, but then you look, even this last week or two, and you see all the people - like Jota at 28 - dying. 'It makes you realise that you have no entitlement to live as long as you'd like to live. 'You've got to be ready for anything and I think once you go through an illness you are. You've got out of jail once. 'As a young man you don't know who you are. I was far too self analytical as a footballer - before games, after and during games. I came to realise that there is a compulsive disorder with that. You are just born with it. A bit of OCD there. 'But we all have those mental issues and the older I've got the more I've understood it. I think you are always discovering. I don't think it ever ends.' I ask him what he'd change about himself. The answer comes from left field, as he would seek the key that enables him to escape the cell where he has been a prisoner of his own social inhibitions. 'If I could sing, I would be a social animal. I'd love to be able to sing like Bob O'Malley. I'd learn so many songs and I'd sing, even now, at 63, in front of everybody. I would love to be able to hold an audience big or small and sing my heart out. 'I think maybe what I am saying is I feel socially inadequate. I'm socially inhibited in some shape or form.' He wants to return to Meath's restoring of the old psychic connection with their people after becoming the first team since Offaly in 1982 to defeat Dublin, Kerry and Galway in the same summer. 'It is important for me that the players I played with don't think I don't like them or that I'm being disrespectful. The same with the young Meath lads now. 'If I was on the team and I read about an old Meath footballer saying they didn't go to Meath matches any more, I would have said to myself, 'well he is some arrogant f**ker.' 'I thought Meath were magnificent the last day. I thought their goose was cooked when Galway came back and hit them with those goals. But they showed amazing character to come back. It was the first time in a long, long time that I felt stirred by it. 'I just felt very proud of those young lads in the green jersey when I saw the last 15 minutes. A Meath team standing up for the first time in 20 years and it did stir my soul a little bit (here he laughs in a self-deprecating fashion). Ah no it did, I felt it and I thought 'I love that spirit.' 'I haven't had that feeling in a long time to be honest.. It was a good feeling to watch and feel really proud of them, feel just a twinge of emotion.'
Irish Independent
2 hours ago
- Irish Independent
Joe Brolly: It's very hard to live with the pace of Jimmy McGuinness' new model Donegal
Eamon McGee, an All-Ireland winner in 2012, was talking on a podcast last week. It was powerful. 'We were able to play in a zone where very few people can go, where you are physically exhausted but you keep going. Most footballers back off from that place. They say, 'Naw, naw, that's me done'. We were consistently in that zone and that's better than any medal.
Irish Examiner
2 hours ago
- Irish Examiner
Jimmy Lee on Limerick's journey: 'We're hoping to build something, and it has to be sustainable'
Brian Flanagan's words were for his crew and county. His statement and sentiment, though, was equally applicable to the crestfallen Treaty after their Tailteann Cup defeat on Saturday. 'This isn't the end by any means. It is purely the beginning,' said Flanagan. Kildare have rehabbed and rebuilt and raised themselves to a higher championship rung. Limerick's own house also stands on a solid foundation. That foundation must remain untouched in the months ahead. Another cycle of rebuilding has to be avoided at all costs. Jimmy Lee spoke afterwards of his players forever walking tall despite knowingly committing to a sport that sits fourth in the local pecking order. He now needs to hold onto those players. Twenty-eight Limerick footballers were profiled in Saturday's match programme. Sixteen of them made their championship debut across the last three years. That's the inexperience and infancy you are left with when the player churn is as strong as it has been in recent years on Shannonside. Nineteen players did not recommit after Jimmy's debut 2023 season, 16 more said goodbye at the end of 2024. The turnover this winter, at the very minimum, has to be kept to single figures. Ideally, no one walks and Limerick continue on this path with an unchanged panel that is stronger and tighter for this year's journey. 'These lads, they're special,' said Lee. 'They're mad about the jersey. They have fierce pride and passion in what they do. And sometimes it's not easy to walk tall. I saw an interview with Cillian [Fahy] before the game, and, unfortunately, football is the fourth sport, probably, in Limerick. But they still walk tall. They still put in the effort. 'We were in a shop during the week and people were asking for their autographs. I was talking to a girl yesterday, her young fella plays with Claughan, but this young fella wants to play football again. That's what they have done. 'Coming off the field there and seeing people looking to meet them, that's very special for the boys. Sometimes you don't have that happen, but that's the journey they're on, and that's the journey we'd hope they'd stay on because Division 3 is next year. It's a phenomenally competitive division on paper. But we're hoping to build something, and it has to be sustainable. 'Limerick football has been through peaks and troughs, peaks and troughs. Even if we could get to a flat line and say, you're sustaining it year on year. Whatever we build, it's got to be progressive, looking forward all the time, and sustainable.' That's the bigger picture given due time. The smaller picture was Saturday's 70 minutes. Forty-seven minutes in, Killian Ryan's goal pushed them two ahead. A seven-point swing having trailed by five early in the second period. This lead proved the end rather than the beginning of their second half push. Why so? 'We tried. It was Kildare to a point. We had a few opportunities. I felt if we'd got another score, but we knew some of the lads were tiring as well, the heat, the exhaustion of it. We felt we needed to freshen things up, and we were trying to do that in the middle of trying to keep the scoreboard ticking as well. It's tricky enough because you lose that bit of momentum with subs at times. 'So near and yet so far but wouldn't look back and say it was because of this, that or anything else. I just walked in and said, to a man, they have put their shoulder to the wheel all year, and that's all you can ever ask of them. They died with their boots on.' Every single one of those boots must walk tall again in 2026. Read More Behind the scenes: Inside the Limerick football camp and culture
