Electric Ireland Leinster MFC quarter-finals<\/p>\n
Meath 5-16 Offaly 0-9<\/p>\n
Kildare 5-15 Westmeath 0-12<\/p>\n
By Paul Keane<\/p>\n
Meath and Kildare are through to the last four of the Electric Ireland Leinster MFC title race after a couple of big quarter-final wins this evening.<\/p>\n
Kildare were at their ease in Mullingar where they breezed to a comprehensive win over a talented Westmeath side that had displayed real quality with three previous wins.<\/p>\n
But while Meath were even bigger 22-point winners against Offaly in Tullamore, that was a significantly closer game in reality.<\/p>\n
In fact, with just 13 minutes to go Trevor Giles’ Meath led by just three points having been outscored in the third quarter by 0-6 to 0-1.<\/p>\n
Paddy Burns reeled off four of those six Offaly points during the home side’s purple patch, along with scores from substitute Joe Furey and Dara Waldron, to leave Meath only 0-11 to 0-8 ahead.<\/p>\n
But the final quarter belonged to Meath who hit the throttle in dramatic fashion, slamming in five goals as well as a series of points, and reeling off 3-4 without response between the 48th and 57th minutes.<\/p>\n
Liam O’Donoghue struck Meath’s first goal before turning provider for a Conn Brennan major in the 54th minute.<\/p>\n
Seconds later, Cormac Walsh fed substitute Dara Loughran for Meath’s third goal before the same player added a point.<\/p>\n
Tomas Proudfoot scored Meath’s fourth goal in stoppage time and when Harris Moffat intercepted the subsequent kick-out and returned the ball to the net with interest, it was goal number five.<\/p>\n
It’s a powerful bounceback from a Meath side that lost two of its three group games and a sweet quarter-final win as last year’s Royal County minors were knocked out at this same stage by Offaly.<\/p>\n
Meath have also scored 11 goals in just two games having hit Wicklow for 6-23 in their preliminary quarter-final tie.<\/p>\n
Kildare were comfortable throughout their big win over Westmeath in Mullingar with all five of their goals coming in the first half.<\/p>\n
The contest was only seconds old when Cian Kehoe struck the first Kildare goal and Aidan Tobin made it 2-2 to 0-3 after just six minutes.<\/p>\n
Liam Mescal, Jack Doran and Jamie Flood registered the other goals to leave Kildare virtually home and hosed at half time when they led by 5-8 to 0-4.<\/p>\n
P\u00e1id\u00ed Ryan, Eoghan Lyons, Logan Tennyson and Jack Reilly added second half points for a talented Kildare side.<\/p>\n
Mark Monaghan’s two-pointer was one of the few first half highlights for Westmeath.<\/p>\n
Monaghan, free-taker Stephen McWade, Darragh Murray, Conor Cleary and Finn Brennan added singles after the break for the hosts.<\/p>\n
And there was an impressive Aaron Connaire two-pointer as Westmeath edged the second half scoring by a point to restore some pride.<\/p>\n
Meath and Kildare have joined group winners Dublin and Louth in Leinster’s last four.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Electric Ireland Leinster MFC quarter-finals Meath 5-16 Offaly 0-9 Kildare 5-15 Westmeath 0-12 By Paul Keane Meath and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":434075,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,60,43],"class_list":["post-434074","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/434074","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=434074"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/434074\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/434075"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=434074"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=434074"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=434074"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}