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GAA

07th May 2018

‘Leinster is a joke at the moment. I wouldn’t even watch a Leinster championship match now’

Jack O'Toole

Five-time All-Ireland winner Tomás Ó Sé has said that he wouldn’t even watch a Leinster championship match now and that the provincial championship has become a joke.

Dublin have won 12 of the last 13 Leinster Senior Football Championships after winning just one of 10 finals in the decade before their one-point win over Laois in the 2005 final.

Jim Gavin’s side cruised to a nine-point win over Kildare in last year’s final and Ó Sé feels that every other team in the province is so far behind the three-time defending All-Ireland champions that the competition has become stale as a result of Dublin’s dominance.

“I think Dublin and Kerry are well ahead in both provinces,” Ó Sé said on RTÉ Radio 1. “Whatever about Leinster. Leinster is a joke at the moment. Take Dublin out of it and you’ve a good Leinster championship.

“The rest are so far behind at the moment. Everyone talks about Dublin, whatever, how brilliant (they are). I think teams are beaten before they go out against Dublin.

“It’s ridiculous. I wouldn’t even watch a Leinster championship match now.”

Colm Parkinson and Cian Ward discussed the differences between Leinster and the Ulster championship last summer where there has been three different winners in the last four years.

Parkinson felt that Ulster’s best three teams were still a significant distance behind Dublin in last year’s championship.

“The perception of Ulster and the perception of Leinster… then when you actually break it down, there’s not an awful lot between them,” he said on The GAA Hour.

“It’s the fact that Ulster have three teams and Leinster have one but the three teams in Ulster are way below Leinster’s best.”

Cian Ward put it another way.

“If you swapped Dublin and took any of those three (Monaghan, Tyrone and Donegal) and put them into Leinster, the Leinster championship would be very competitive,” the Meath man said.

“If you swapped Dublin with Monaghan, Tyrone or Donegal, you’d have a seriously competitive Leinster championship and everybody in Leinster would think that they could win it.”

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