Leinster Senior Football Championship 2017

Started by Junior Ex Laoistalk, November 18, 2016, 01:47:15 AM

Previous topic - Next topic

High Fielder

I just posted the names of four corner backs who have been replaced by half backs at best. Analyse the thing properly instead of spouting this half baked crap about being a division two team. We're not the f**king colour of it apart from when you're dreaming.

redsetanta

You need good corner backs. Would we have won anything without the likes of Joe and Aidan Fennelly in the corners?
The real glory is being knocked to your knees and then coming back. That's real glory. VinceLombardi

High Fielder

You need players playing in their natural position at the very least. You also need the best available person in each position. Lads on here don't care about the turnover of players or injuries and availability. They keep peddling this ridiculous notion that we can suck it up. Well here's the headline. We can't. Ballyroan saying we're Division 2 is the cherry. Even his own man McMahon is a long way shy of what's needed these days. Sad but true. Can we blame Peter Creedon for a lad getting older too? Dung. Absolute dung

BallyroanAbu

#78
Unbelievable, from the very beginning I said this management choice was uninspired it turned out even worse.  At the beginning I was called an idiot and stupid.  So we are back full circle again I am an idiot and stupid, however I will say it now our players and clubs are no worse than 24 other counties.   We continually knock our own, be it managers or players.   We bring in clowns, pay them and then are shocked when it goes wrong.  Peter Creedon will have no success in Laois because he is a moderate, uninspired choice who has little knowledge of Laois football.   This county is a political minefield I said months ago that Creedon would get us relegated and even after relegation things will get worse.  This county is afraid of doing the right thing.  If you think knocking McMahon is the thing to do go right ahead,  I never said he had a divine right to be on the county team.   We would gladly have him back in Ballyroan where he is appreciated.   

High Fielder

I didn't knock the lad. He doesn't have the legs he once had. Neither do I. Just a fact of life. Nobody's fault, and of course I appreciate his commitment.

As for your ridiculous overrating of Laois football, I'll forgive your obvious bias. Your own club couldn't beat a one man team last year in the Championship. It is low grade football played in the main by poor footballers and poor teams. Start being realistic. If it was as good as all that, and let us suppose Peter Creedon was the class clown, we still wouldn't be in Division 4. There's much more to all this than the Senior management.

BallyroanAbu

I think you will find quite a few County Teams had trouble with him too.



High Fielder

Nobody who is anybody wanted the Laois job Ballyroan. I think you know that. Nobody in Laois has the CV to get the job. I think you know that too. I don't know what your expectations are built on, but to me you can't see the glaringly obvious. A lot of the players on the panel are not good enough. Analyse the games. Look at the fault lines. Don't be as naive to say we have 15 players , we are Laois and I expect better. It doesn't work like that. We're more than a good senior coach away from turning the corner.

BallyroanAbu

I do think the players we have are talented enough to be knocking around Div 2,  Laois Football is no longer at a crossroads it's actually quite abit down the road to a desperate state.  At the core of this is the County Board & The Clubs.  Like it or lump we are not professional in our business (it's not easy when you are depending on volunteers).  I am with you on we cannot afford a huge Hollywood type manager but we could of went down the road of creating one.  We need inspiration and what's going on is a a never ending circle of downward performance.   We don't have a strategy or hope to take us out of this we are just waiting for it to happen.  Unfortunately as I get older this just does not happen you have to make it happen.  My thoughts on getting one of our own Club Managers to take the team is A) They are cheaper B) They know the task they face & C) One of them may just be the man.  This in turn would "hopefully pick up performances" leading to improvements off the pitch.  Maybe it's a fairy tale but I gasp in horror with the hurlers celebrating beating Kerry (should be a matter of fact) and the footballers heading for likewise scenario's.  I happened upon this article from 2009 this morning it was interesting.

ends
   
What happened the promising Laois minors?

Quote:
Laois kids' futures all in the past

They never built on their massive underage success and now there are too many egos and not enough honest effort to haul them to the top
Ewan MacKenna

Whitewash: Laois's 15-point defeat against Kildare in the Leinster SFC semi-final was one in a series of heavy losses they have suffered this year Back in 2005, as Laois made their way to Croke Park for an All Ireland quarter-final against Armagh, the first enemy outpost they reached was Athy. There was no hiding the fact either. The south Kildare town was draped with election-style posters, each one reading "Ulster Says No To The Queen's County". They were the work of one local man who'd spent dawn on a rickety stepladder but they encapsulated the sentiments of many in Kildare. There was a jealousy and bitterness that came from not just how well their rivals are doing, but how successful they could be.

Just four years on and Laois should be in a stronger position still, yet all that's left is the wreckage from last Saturday's Leinster semi-final against Kildare and there is very little to salvage from that. As good as their one provincial title and handful of years challenging as a top-eight team were, this is an underage superpower now acting like an irritating rogue state. Since 1996 they have won three All Ireland minor titles. That's more than Dublin, Galway, Mayo, Cork, Kerry and Armagh combined and only Tyrone have achieved more. They've won six Leinster minor titles in that same period too and have won three provincial under-21 titles since 1998.

Yet 40 minutes into last Saturday's clash with Kildare, Laois fans were deserting O'Connor Park and with all that has gone on, the side are in danger of being known as the Queens' County.

It's not a new phenomenon either. In fact it's the fourth time Laois have been embarrassed this year. Bernard Flynn may have talked about the ferocity of a training session he witnessed in the build-up to the game but that masked a side packed with too many egos and that had already been blitzed by Kildare, Monaghan and Cork in the league by an average of 12 points.

The problem is rooted in the past and it's developed into a culture of arrogance that's gone on too long to change. Mick O'Dwyer recently said of the side in this confession box, "He [Fergal Byron] was speaking from his heart because he gave me a wonderful commitment while I was there. Others couldn't say that. There was marvellous material in Laois but they were never as willing to give the same commitment as I got in Kildare. They didn't have the commitment or the same drive." But others there during O'Dwyer's four-year stint put that down as an understatement.

"Micko didn't care after a while because there was nothing he could do about what was going on," says a source familiar with what went on at the time. "But in Kildare guys would run up mountains for that man just because he said so. In Laois they needed explanations. Now that wasn't all of them but there were boys there who would fake injury during laps just to get out of them. All the talent in the world and most of it wasted in that place."

During O'Dwyer's final year, the most successful manager of them all was questioned by a side with just a single provincial title to their name. They ridiculed his methods, demanded change and modernisation and got the beating of a lifetime against Dublin. They didn't learn from that either though because O'Dwyer was far from the only manager to suffer at their hands. When Liam Kearns came to the county in 2007, it was to move forward a career that had seen him take Limerick to the brink of a Munster title. But there was a stage when he couldn't even find a player able to captain Laois. Ross Munnelly was said to be too selfish on the ball, Joe Higgins and Tom Kelly didn't show up for the league and after that there was a void when it came to finding a leader.

And Kearns faced far more startling problems than finding a recipient for an armband. Two players in the side had tried to move towards professionalism, refusing to play for Laois until they were sponsored to do so. What had once been ripe and vibrant was rotten to the core. A member of the Laois set-up at the time who wishes to remain nameless takes it further.

"They were put on a pedestal in Laois after winning those minor titles. If you go in to a pub there are pictures on the wall, there's someone there to buy them a pint and remind them of when they won underage All Irelands. You get that respect for winning senior titles in other counties. And they are making the same mistakes. Before it was Beano and Munnelly, now it's Donie Kingston and Tierney who are elevated too high. Some young guys go into the dressing room and think they rule it. The older guys never put them in their place. No leadership. It's gone too far in Laois and there's no going back. Mentally it's frightening just how weak they are."

Even current manager Seán Dempsey has experienced it and he's only in his first year. A former under-21 manager who dropped Donie Brennan before a 2006 All Ireland semi-final, he was forced to do it again this season officially for alcohol-related breaches of discipline but unofficially for a lack of effort in training. Yet within days, Brennan's club manager Nicky McGrath wrote to a local paper. "If this is correct then I would suggest that at least 50 per cent of the panel should have been dropped," he said.

It's not a coincidence that the only times Laois managed to act as a normal group of footballers were in '03 and '05, the year they captured Leinster and the year they peaked. Since then things have been out of control.

Late last year the players were all given gym membership, as was the case in Kildare, but last Saturday it was clear which group had been pushing themselves to the limit eight months ago. On top of that, three nights training each week doesn't cover for three nights socialising in the same week and while such accusations are aimed at limited numbers on the panel, last Saturday also showed that you can't cover for a colleague at the highest level.

In truth Dempsey neither commanded nor demanded respect from this side but if they weren't willing to respect O'Dwyer, then who will they respect? And when Dempsey realises he'd be better off doing pretty much anything else, who will want to take over such a group? After all, you can't force heart and dedication on a team and it appears they aren't going to force it upon themselves.

Not until Friday did the panel get back into training after their mauling six days previous. In the intervening period many had seen their pictures on the walls and glimpsed back at better days. They might have realised then that their future is buried deeply in the past.

SCFC

Ewan McKenna who wrote that is a Kildare c*** who hates Laois so I'm not sure it's unbiased.

town1980

high fielder apart from portlaoise what other team in the last 4 year beat arles killeen??or do you no,,thats a cheap shot at ballyroan abu,,on tha article for me is a load of horshite from a kildare man yes,,,micko is gone what ten year now ,,,the players dont care about the management anyone that that is local knows how much there out and about socialising flat out every weekend,,as stated they treat it like a club team,,they dont care anymore they just like the thought of been recognised as a laois player in my eyes,,div 4 is an absolute disgrace,,,from top to bottom laois football stinks at the minute,

The Monument Road

Quote from: SCFC on April 22, 2017, 12:12:50 PM
Ewan McKenna who wrote that is a Kildare c*** who hates Laois so I'm not sure it's unbiased.
The same Ewan Mckenna who now resides in Brazil this week wrote a damning article about his own town , Athy and got slated for it locally.So anything he writes about laois is always tinged with an underlying hatred and jealously of laois people.

High Fielder

Quote from: town1980 on April 22, 2017, 01:34:53 PM
high fielder apart from portlaoise what other team in the last 4 year beat arles killeen??or do you no,,thats a cheap shot at ballyroan abu,,on tha article for me is a load of horshite from a kildare man yes,,,micko is gone what ten year now ,,,the players dont care about the management anyone that that is local knows how much there out and about socialising flat out every weekend,,as stated they treat it like a club team,,they dont care anymore they just like the thought of been recognised as a laois player in my eyes,,div 4 is an absolute disgrace,,,from top to bottom laois football stinks at the minute,

Arles Killeen are a one man team. On the subject of Portlaoise, why do so.many players out out? Some of the best players in the county too. Are they moral objectors, because Laois football is an "absolute disgrace"?

clonadmad

How much of what McKenna wrote in that article is actually untrue?

A lot of what goes on here,wouldn't be tolerated in any mildly successful county

BallyroanAbbey

Quote from: The Monument Road on April 22, 2017, 02:02:29 PM
Quote from: SCFC on April 22, 2017, 12:12:50 PM
Ewan McKenna who wrote that is a Kildare c*** who hates Laois so I'm not sure it's unbiased.
The same Ewan Mckenna who now resides in Brazil this week wrote a damning article about his own town , Athy and got slated for it locally.So anything he writes about laois is always tinged with an underlying hatred and jealously of laois people.

Jealous of what exactly?

BallyroanAbu

#89
High Fielder be fair.
Michael Leigh (prob get on most teams in the county)
Donie Brennan(better that what we have)
Jason Enright (decent enough)
O Sheas Decent at club level
Shane Julian decent at club level
Paul Kingston (County Player)

BallyroanAbbey
McMahon, Conroy and Tierney & alot of chaps U19

I thought we did ok