Carlow made a winning start to their campaign as the 2026 Lidl National Football League got under way on Sunday with four games in Division 4.<\/p>\n
The Barrowsiders, who were relegated last year after winning the Division 4 title two seasons ago, edged out Sligo by 1-07 to 1-04 at SETU Carlow.<\/p>\n
They laid the foundation for victory in the opening half and a goal from Cliodhna N\u00ed Sh\u00e9 helped them lead by 1-03 to 0-02 at the break.<\/p>\n
Sligo rallied in the closing stages and a goal from Lauren Normanly cut the gap to three but Carlow held on to make a winning start to their campaign.<\/p>\n
Second-half goals from Marie Byrne and R\u00f3is\u00edn Ennis drove Offaly to a 2-10 to 0-08 win over Wicklow at Bray Emmets.<\/p>\n
Wicklow led by 0-05 to 0-04 at the break but the goals proved crucial as Offaly, also relegated last year, got their season up and running with a double-scores victory.<\/p>\n
Six players found the net as Leitrim, one of the promotion favourites, ousted neighbours Longford by 6-17 to 2-10 at Glennon Brothers Pearse Park.<\/p>\n
Leitrim, with goals from Vivienne Egan, Leah Fox and Kate Gormley, led by 3-05 to 1-06 at the interval and they pushed on from there, with Muireann Devaney, Aoife Gilmartin and Emma Guckian also finding the net.<\/p>\n
Katie Crawford got the Longford goals in each half.<\/p>\n
Derry only won one league match last season but they have matched that already when they repeated their 2025 win over Kilkenny, winning by 4-12 to 0-03 in Owenbeg.<\/p>\n
A goal from Aine McAlister helped Derry lead by 1-07 to 0-00 at the break and further goals came after the restart from Kate Hargan, Clodagh Moore and Jeanette Slevin.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Carlow made a winning start to their campaign as the 2026 Lidl National Football League got under way…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":252060,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":{"0":"post-252059","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252059","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=252059"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252059\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/252060"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=252059"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=252059"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=252059"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}