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tomorrow is going to be a sorry day for laois hurling as we are going to be beaten twice in tullamore. it will be a big bump in the road as Che Guevara would say.
Westmeath gave us loads of trouble last May, they are confident, on a roll and have a full squad. we are missing half of our team from 2015, and what has replaced that core are, as of now, inferior.

the 6/4 about Westmeath is an insult, they are firm favourites to win.

high fielder you are correct in much of what you say.


however I remember an even bleaker outlook back 15 or so years ago. at that time the laois county board were over 200k in the red, o moore park was a shambles and the county teams were merely ticking over.

a new look county executive emerged with dick miller at the helm(not everyones cup of tea). in the space of 3/4 years the county grounds was transformed with the new stand, the debt was wiped out via the clubs/county draw being established and the micko era emerged on top of the minor success.

so a bad situation can be addressed quickly if the right foundations are in place. the key driving force is an astute, committed, non selfish and open minded county executive.

alas as of now we have one of the worst county executives nationwide. of the personnel aboard you would certainly baulk at the idea of employing more than 4 of them in any capacity.
it is this executive which is driving the narrative that we must shop locally(and cheapest) on the managerial fronts, and the upshot is that our premium team(the county footballers) are now in free fall, with rock bottom of division 4 looming after next season.

there are individuals within this county who if the landscape was cleared would join the county executive and be prepared to raise the funding to unearth the best possible management teams for our county teams(as opposed to the cheapest as of now). getting a clear out of the executive is no easy task. the individuals who bring zero to the executive table are the ones who refuse to leave, as you frequently see that once their 5 year term is up, they simply switch into another executive position.

the current chairman will go down as a rather forgettable incumbent. if you think he has been poor, I would have to close my eyes and wince at the prospect of the current deputy moving up one position.

from my knowledge there are clubs in Dublin with excellent club committees and many of those sitting on the laois executive would not be entertained in such clubs.

have a look at the current county executive and ask the following question. what expertise does each member bring to the table? I know out treasurer is an accountant, apart from that I see zero expertise.

concluding with high fielders points.......yes the club senior football c/ship is a joke, crowds are dwindling, interest is at an all time low, not one underage team is standing out in its grade and the overall level of proper coaching is not on a par with other counties.............our current county executive is asleep at the wheel and none of our troubles will start to be tackled until an inevitable backlash arises and there is a big clearout and an avenue is paved for new blood with brighter ideas to take up the challenges.

purely judged on last sunday I could go to town on the management and many of those that played...it would be a cheap shot.

as we stand here today, cheddar and his backroom staff will still be in a 50-50 chance  of reaching a  leinster semi final in 2016, remember that game is the big one this season.

unless they make an about turn, the retirements has shed this team of great structure, over the last 2years we have lost  almost the entire back line save  for healy.............typical laois hurling, one  could say, we make  progress and then age acts as a spoilsport.........we have been hearing the spin that the underage  structures have been improving, they have, but now is the real test of that  narrative, as  these kids must prove able deputies  for our departed soldiers.

based on last sunday the likes  of bergin, mullaney, reddin, and carroll don't look the solution...however, having to blood so many newcomers at the same time is never ideal.
forget about the walsh cup in the muck, the main trials  for the championship will be in the remaining 4 league  games...I am sure plenty will get their chance, and there may be an element of moving the deckchairs.

you must hand  one thing to cheddar...last year laois staggered in the round robin games but they were on song for the offaly game, in other words he peaked them to perfection.  I  would be prepared to sacrifice this league as a learning curve, if it helps put the pieces of the jigsaw together for the championship.

my one big criticism of cheddar was  that he was solely at fault for the failure of a decent under 21 team in 2015, the resignation saga the day  before that under 21 game left a sour taste.

given how well the players did at minor level, one would reasonably expect the 2016 under 21s to be the best chance laois have of winning provincial silverware in 2016.....we have a very favourable draw and I sincerely hope cheddar gives this squad his utmost attention, they deserve it.

having been critical of the team last sunday, I must congratulate them on the honesty of effort, we did ride our luck, but we were due a turn.

we had a better shape than last sunday, though it must be said that Armagh were woeful at midfield and considering we were without our top two in that position, the weakness of the orchard may have covered over some of our cracks.

the positives...o carroll, Kingston and cahillane put in a good shift in the forwards and were always dangerous...Armagh lacked one forward of the same class. although not looking 100% fit I felt that donogher added to the team with some pace and link up play.
finally we scored a penalty!....after 3 big games in a row with failures to convert from the spot(Kildare, antrim and last sunday), that was a cracker of a penalty from cahillane.
some good free taking, cahillane from an awkward angle in the first half, walsh from about 55 yards in the first half, donie from the hands, and as it turned out a fantastic 45 against the wind from o carroll near the end..........I dunno if having so many options for frees or 45s is a good or bad thing,worked out all right tonight.
fitness seemed a little better than last week.

the negatives
our backs looked in trouble when run at, on a bad day like last sunday we could leak a bad score....I think we lack a big physical presence in defence, no idea what/who is the solution.
the newcomers remain with question marks against them, young Farrell did not deserve to be sent off, though he looked naïve at this level. cotter was doing ok as a spoiler as he has done with portlaoise, the Armagh managers complaints may have led to his black card, but his style has you on a tightrope...will need cotter against the likes of cavan....not sure of seale or dillion either in defence.....campion had good and bad moments, very raw at this level.

we may be in a mini league with Armagh,Cavan and Fermanagh....5 points for survival.....away to Cav and Ferm, all to play for.

I will hold my hands up and say I was against the appointment of lillis and also his predecessor Flaherty, and I really liked mcnulty(might have been in a minority).

if laois happens to end the division 2 campaign pointless and relegated, should lillis be given the heave ho before the championship? or should he then be allowed to continue to lead the lambs to the slaughter in the championship?

I ask the two above questions because the narrative out there is that laois had no money to appoint a decent manager, and lillis was considered a cheap option.

trouble is, there remain serious fixed costs with all senior inter county sides irrespective of management, and the extra premium of a "name" coach is not that huge in the bigger picture.
In appointing a cheap option, the executive may end up sucking the lifeblood out of  the present squad, supporters losing interest and a developing apathy, all detrimental to the long term welfare of the intercounty game in Laois.

lillis and his selectors have been in position for nearly 5 months, we all saw them sitting together in the stand for the latter stages of the club championships in laois. what they served up laois sunday in terms of selection and team tactics, I would easily say any 3 random punters could have done no worse. The game was dead after 40 minutes, the slight improvement at the finish was meaningless as galway were simply running down the clock happy in their position.

Armagh are probably(w/o the Cross members) the next weakest outfit in div 2. If we lose by 5 points or heavier, I suspect we may see the start of a snowball effect to remove the management.......I will be happy to be proved wrong.

management out of their depth, poor team selection, no discernible set up.....mick and co would have been more suited to a county like Carlow with no expectations.

woolly's tweet about the number of starters linked to the selectors home clubs did hit home today, 4 of them hooked by half time.
take out Kingston and we are a middle table div 3 team, now on a par with offaly.

I cannot start to imagine what Dublin would do to us in the championship judged on that performance today.

rte radio last sunday with 3 panellists and newstalk during the week ditto were in unanimous agreement that laois were the one team certain to be relegated from division 2. they all wrote off the team. it should act as some sort of incentive for the players to stand up and be counted.

I do suspect despite the advantage of 4 homes v 3 aways, that at least a draw is required from Saturday night or else the doomsayers could be predicting right.

lillis is as slow as a snail,  once turned he is fuxked....you saw the leinster club final and the boden team walking through the middle of town defence.

I am open minded on 2016 for the senior football team apart from Lillis, who in my mind has no place in a championship squad..........no doubt he will get plenty of chances.

Kingston can play anywhere, the rest of the forwards need to up their game and stop relying upon him.

the only way mj would stand 5ft 10 would be in 4 inch high heel shoes....shows the unreliability of that wiki lark

I may be alone in my opinion, but is it not a  complete joke that the reason many senior clubs refuse to take on a few players from a junior/intermediate club and become a senior amalgam IS BECAUSE if they win the senior championship they cannot then compete at provincial level.

one club in laois has monopolised the senior for 9 years, and it would be a very big job of work for an amalgam to dethrone them.

surely if an amalgam did win the senior championship, that in itself would be a huge achievement, they could alter their arrangement the following year if they want to meet the provincial qualification criteria.

the "not eligible for leinster" is the biggest red herring of all.

my memory is not good enough to answer that specific question about territory of individual clubs, I would suspect that there exists a number of juvenile players who play juvenile in some sort of area/amalgam setup, and these players may have a personal choice on which adult club they join, within the given area.

scfc, what you are describing may be another example of a laois solution for a laois problem......the laois county board may grant permission, but you will find said player may run into trouble should one of his teams end up playing in a club competition outside of laois, ie leinster club championship, and the presence of this player may akin to area teams winning a senior championship deem them ineligible to compete on a provincial stage.....as whilst laois may grant grace and permission to the player, he will still be breaching national rules.

hi keyser,

I had to check back on some locked away paperwork, it is not 5 years ago, actually 8 to 9 we are talking about.

there had been frequent comment on club boundaries and it was decided by the county executive to establish a task force to sort the thorny issue out. I was one of  6 on that taskforce. We initially sent out a circular to all adult clubs asking them to basically map out or state their perceived territories. Upon receiving the replies, "yield not an inch and take as much as you can" was the clear impression taken from the replies. Frequently we had clubs wishing on their territory maps to delete another club completely, that element surprised no one.
We also had a spanner thrown into  the works when Tom Cahill of Ballypickas asked us to get a clear definition of the phrase "parish" as referred to in places in the GAA rulebook.  Ballypickas wanted an answer from Croke Park as to whether the term "parish" referred to Catholic parish, Church Of Ireland parish, Presbyterian parish or other.....the chair of our task force was a strong and vocal advocate of the parish rule, so after a number of letters to Croke Park with no  satisfactory answer coming back, our group were given a meeting in Croke Park with the main rules people. That meeting defined the future.
We were basically told that under no circumstances could CLG come out and state that their basic structures(clubs) could be based on the geographical parishes of one specific church(ie the catholic church), as were the CLG/GAA to do so would leave it open to sectarian criticism. What we were told off the record, was the each county should try and keep to the local catholic parish boundaries, though this could never be set in stone. It was highlighted that each and every county had a little tweak on boundaries and in a nutshell a laois solution to a laois problem was the answer.

from that date, our committee chairman a long term advocate of the parish rule was crestfallen and to this day he has given up completely on promoting that idea as in the bigger picture, from a GAA political perspective the organisation will always refuse to associate with sectarianism and therefore official backing to a "catholic parish rule" will never ever be sanctioned.

after that, our task force went back to each and every club, trashed out their "boundaries", and in many cases we ended up with many clubs inside and outside of "catholic parishes" having overlapping territory. As Croke Park refused us permission to apply the parish rule, our hands were tied.

after this episode, the maps were drawn up and to this day they are still in some file in the O Moore Park offices. since then, advocates of the parish rule have got little hearing as they don't have any grounds, as a "Catholic" parish may have totally different boundaries to a "Church Of Ireland" parish in the same area, and as we are not entitled to carve up upon a perceived sectarian parish, the old chestnut of a laois solution to a laois problem is in play. I  must add that all that we dealt with fell under the umbrella of Adult Clubs, ie from Minor upwards, the juvenile set up is a totally different beast.

the rule about Exclusive clubs was altered a bit in 2014 as something happened in Cork in 2013 and Murphy got involved and a clear definitive rule was voted in.

I cannot answer you the question on Mountmellick, I do remember a few years ago they functioned in theory as Mountmellick Football and Mountmellick Hurling, supposedly as separate clubs when in effect it was all the one.......I have no idea if this is pertains.


on the final question of fixture chaos, get over it, it will be a problem that the fixtures committee will have to solve, in essence not that big a deal in the bigger scheme of things....and I say that as someone who has sat on fixtures committees within the county over a number of years.

approx. 5 years ago I was amongst the committee which drew up the designated areas for all the clubs in laois. there was much argument at the time about parishes and boundaries. I know for a fact that the three smallest junior hurling clubs, kyle, slieve bloom and ballypickas refused to be pigeon holed into one parish, as they held their ground on the fact that traditionally they sourced their membership and players from 2 or 3 straddling parishes. from memory ballypickas and slieve bloom, on articles accepted by the laois executive at the time were granted territory in three different parishes. that particular "map" has not been altered in the interim. so the posters who would pigeon hole slieve bloom into castletown parish or ballypickas into ballyroan/abbeyleix simply do not know the existing situation. slieve bloom's juveniles may mostly play with castletown at underage level, this does not mean that slieve bloom is a castletown parish club. it's grounds may be within the parish, the allotted club territory is not exclusively within that one parish.

a second piece of information. central council passed into law a rule effective from the first of January 2014, that from that date onwards, players from an Exclusively Hurling or Football Club, could only play the other code with a club that was Exclusive in the opposite code.

the above two items are the facts as exist now, as opposed to plenty of opinions ignoring gaa law.


as and from 2014, if you play hurling with an exclusively hurling club, for example in laois, kyle, clonad, trumera and now slieve bloom, and should you wish to kick adult football in laois, your options are limited to a handful of exclusive football Only clubs.

I would not have thought that slieve bloom had much in the way of talented footballers, excuse my ignorance, if they do, and they want to play football at adult level, then their options looking from a geographic perspective(ruling out the Carlow side of the county), would be The Rock, Port, O Dempseys, Courtwood, Annanough, The Heath or Emo. logically looking at the lie of the land you could narrow it down to Emo or O Dempseys, and if they are really keen to play then let them at it. it is not as though we are talking about 4 or 5 inter county class players, at best I would guess a few squad club players.

does any gaa  club in Ireland wear brown jerseys or even a combination involving brown?

the nearest clubs, and senior at that, across county borders. must be gracefield and portarlington. they are based in the same town, grounds less than a mile apart. I have no idea what the dividing line is for the two counties or clubs.