Messages

I feel rathdowney are timing their challenge nicely and may prove too strong for camross, in a tight call. this game a bit like Dublin/Kerry is in effect the final.

I fear borris will beat ballinakill in the second game...fear because if borris make the final, I expect another bottle job..ballinakill would provide a more entertaining final, though no doubt lose it.

yes perhaps it is time to address the numbers of clubs at senior level.

if we want to make it 12 senior and 12 intermediate in perhaps 2 years times...here is the way to do it.


next year, 2017, we will have 16 senior clubs.

revert to 4 groups of 4.
group winners to quarters.
group 2nd and 3rds into a play off for the 4 other quarter spots.#
bottom of each group relegated.

to make it fair, at draw stage...the 4 semi finalists from 2016 would be seeded, one into each group and the remaining places randomly drawn.

an idea.....sure to be shot down!.

well done to both sides in an entertaining minor final, and congrats to the winners.

in the debate on amalgams, don draper has hammered home the nail....no one pays a bit of notice to amalgams if they exit in round 1 or 2...if they have the brassneck to be still in come final time, then suddenly an amalgam becomes a problem.

this board, bar the rare exception, agrees there must be change to the senior football structure with clubs twinning or trebling up to form a competitive team. dinosaurs in single clubs tend to be the biggest stumbling block to change.

by  embracing amalgams at minor level, you are in a sounder position to promote them at adult level.

in a perfect world, at minor level for instance, it would be super if there was a spread of titles over a ten year period won by various amalgams mixed with single club wins for the likes of the town, or port or graigue.

jimmy you are dead right in your assessment of the senior football scene.
if portlaoise are tuned in, then nobody, barring biased referees will stop them.
after that about ten of the other senior teams may at the start of every year fancy their prospects of getting to the final, in fact without portlaoise, it would be a wide open affair.

in truth, the hurling model of 8 senior a, 8 senior b, is needed in football.......trouble here is that you would have to try convincing 8 that they would have to lose their "a" status, and how would you get there....if you were to base it on the 2017 championship....first round losers, being relegated to senior "b", then whoever would draw portlaoise in round 1 would get the wrong end of the stick.

I think it will be a portlaoise, Killeen final, heavier defeat for latter in the final than last Saturday night.

without digging too deep

1999 laois senior hurling championship

2 groups of 4....
group a
castletown, rathdowney, clonad, camross

rnd 1
castletown drew with camross, rathdowney bt clonad,

rnd 2
castletown bt clonad,  rathdowney bt camross

rnd 3
castletown bt rathdowney, camross bt clonad

if memory serves, the last game was a dead rubber, and it was one of the few(if only) times that camross were eliminated at group stage.
the harps and portlaoise came out of the other group.


so yes, there you have proof that there did exist 2 groups of 4 as a format in the laois senior hurling championship.

I don't buy the rubbish about extending the senior to ten teams to help mountrath, colt etc.....if they are not good enough and not going to be competitive, all you will be doing is dragging others down to their level. the onus should be on these clubs to improve and strife to join the elite on merit and be competitive.

I admire what abbeyleix have done in hurling now and of late, great work and time being invested in the sport in the town. however I find your attitude on the senior hurling format a little defeatist....what you want for abbeyleix, is to increase the number of senior teams to 10, so that your club will always be safe from relegation and each year have at least one handy game, and perhaps one year get a pudding of a group draw with as many as 3 of the makeweights!.....never mind, if you happen to lose your next 2 games, you will have plenty of handy games at senior b next year, if easy winnable games is the endgoal.

we 100% did have the system of 2 groups of 4 in the past, in the 90s....did not work in that era.

home boys home
you are in a minority of one, when it comes to wanting to ditch the current system and revert to two groups of 4.....over the years no matter what you done in terms of game order, there were always dead rubbers and this resulted in one team gaining and another losing due to the group format and it failed to ignite the interest of spectators.

there may only be room for 8 teams under the current system, but that is the right number as it is ultra competitive. to extend to 10 or 12, all you are doing is bringing in non competitive teams that will be cannon fodder.

I note, you do refer to "luck of  the draw" being a factor in the current format, and I suspect that you may be from abbeyleix, because they seem to have been dealt the weakest hand "draw wise"............an open draw is a fair lottery system, sometimes it favours you, other times not. In most people's eyes Abbeyleix are about seed number 6, they should be embracing the challenge of moving up the ratings by beating a higher seed, rather than complaining about the "bad draws".

this weekend
I think B/K  will just have a little too much for ballinakill,

C/Ballacolla v Camross, comes down to the CB attitude...if they are not 100% tuned in, then Camross may shade  it.

I think Rathdowney/E v abbeyleix will be entertaining, with R/E pulling away in the final quarter.

Portlaoise v Harps. most are making this a win for Portlaoise, I will swing the other way.....P/L did not impress me at the Senior B ranks last year, and I felt they were flattered by C/B, who looked to be going through the motions. The Harps were awful v Ballinakill, but in 2015 they pulled a massive performance  out of no where to hammer castletown. I think the Harps have the better players and if you are into odds, the 5/2 about them beating Portlaoise is very tempting. This Portlaoise side struggles big time when it comes to scoring goals, and such teams in hurling are always vulnerable.

it was a good game to watch as a neutral and ballylinan on the overall run of the 60 odd minutes deserved to win.

I think our friends in graigue are entitled to feel a little aggrieved about some decisions.

one would have to question the wisdom of appointing a referee to this fixture when one of his fellow clubmen was managing/coaching one of the teams. I thought that was a general no-no.

another game should bring graigue on a bit.

given that we have a full time secretary, you would think he could find half an hour most weeks/days and update things.
the PRO after all is just another volunteer as distinct from a career professional.

the BL's personal note is of zero relevance when majority rule dictates with DRA. The Laois Executive have been told what they have for by law as of now is not good enough and they have been ordered to change.

most disturbing....the tab for the episode has to be picked up by Laois GAA, no change out of 2 grand or more I would imagine.


I have nil to do with Portlaoise, and from the tone of this thread most posters seem anti the town club. what I would point out is that Portlaoise GAA in fairness are entitled to protect their position...the bye law almost expects them to lose loads of players and not to gain any.....we all know deep down, that was the intention.

at a future date, we could easily see the demographic of an Irish town such as Portlaoise become similar to those of former industrial towns in places like Yorkshire and Lancashire........the immediate inner town mile radius or so becomes an immigrant ghetto and the locals are forced further and further out to the suburbs....remember the majority of these immigrants will not play GAA, it will in fact be a GAA wasteland.
this is slowly happening in a number of irish towns...in the case of portlaoise, a couple of miles out into the suburbs and as of now you are into park, heath, clonad, colt, ballyfin areas.

I cannot blame portlaoise gaa for taking measures to protect their future in the circumstances.

not a thousand people at the game, as small an attendance as at the laois antrim qualifier in 2015.
fans of both sides are realistic, and in fairness there has been little between the two sides for a number of years.
without Clarke, Armagh really don't pose a goal threat, and that was a factor. laois should have won by more, the win may bring us on a little and if we happened to draw the likes of Sligo I would fancy another win, cavan(if they lose to tyrone) would be the one we would like to avoid. Cunningham has at least brought some defensive edge to laois, there was none in the league campaign.

one question for Armagh supporters. in laois most honest football fans consider Justin mcnulty to have been our best manager in the past 12 years, even the players rated him on a completely different level to the likes of liam kearns and even micko. why has he not been in the running for the Armagh job?. I have no doubt, leaving aside political allegiances, that he will be an excellent assembly member for the area. perhaps, he is biding his time, and waiting for a better crop of young players to harvest at a later date?.

we are a seeded team, should be winning this one in our stride, offaly a border line ring cup team, their fans living in the past, cannot see that they now have plonk as compared to the champagne of the past.

ok this thread is basically about the gaa and betting with questions on financial kickbacks and underage game wagering.

apart from the two domestic firms, paddys and boyles, many overseas companies are more than happy to offer markets on our games, from inter county to club. in one  way, by offering this product, internationally, it is a compliment to the honesty attached to our  games. these same betting firms are very quick to pull markets on a variety of sports if they deem them contaminated or rigged. I have not heard any information from my various trading office sources to say that any coups have happened in gaa games. this indicates the positive, that whilst  the game is played for sporting purposes, the secondary commercial(gambling) aspect  is not impacting  on games.

I don't see what the problem is about pricing minor games. the firms offer prices on underage soccer games and rugby games and the fact that these games are open to betting does not impact on rugby or soccer. the amount wagered on minor games, save for all Ireland finals and semi finals is relatively light compared to senior games.

along with the idea of getting some sort of rake/return from sports wagering is long since dead. as lone shark mentions, most of the betting firms are now sited off shore and with the majority of betting on line, you cannot tax them or prevent them from trading underage games. as highlighted earlier, if these  underage games were dodgy, be in no doubt the markets would be closed.

if gamblers want to gamble, they will find a means of doing so. better to have it  in the open than to drive it underground or overseas.
this horse has  long since bolted.

the usual guff after a pathetic defeat.

facts are this under 21 age group, 3 years ago hammered offaly by 15 points and chinned a decent wexford team in the semi final and gave commendable displays against Kilkenny and galway.

the truth is

1-
Carlow are not a good team, they would not get within 12 points of any team in munster and save for doyle the rest are very ordinary. if you cannot beat Carlow at under 21 then you are rock bottom.

2-
the only underage teams that have given hope for the future are those under the care of pat critchley....when you take him out of the picture, the truth is there is  no other coach in the county up to intercounty standard and I include cheddar in that statement.

3-
this under 21 team represented our best chance as a county of contesting a provincial final at any grade hurling or football in 2016, and from what I hear the preparations were poor.

4
I was unimpressed by managements of minor and under 21 hurling squads in 2016....perhaps it is time to fish further afield for a coach to help bring these panels up to intercounty standard......and before someone launches on a tirade about keeping it in-house, very few senior clubs have laois managers, and  from what I have seen in the past 2 years, none of the club minor or under 21 teams managers/coaches have the skill set and knowledge to be positioned to take an inter county squad.

5
should the senior hurlers lose to offaly and possibly get a season ending hammering thereafter by a munster county then the hurling project will have hit a very troublesome bump in the road, as cheddar might say. cheddar will leave and I have zero confidence in the county executive when it comes to appointments. following lillis in the football, one would fear we may get an uninspiring and negative choice akin to McCarthy or Fennelly for the hurling, and that would be a death knell and laying a path to the Christy Ring.

castletown won the  county minor championship last  year and not one on the starting 15, at least 5 or 6 of the mountrath community school team that got to the leinster a semi final were from castletown, surely one or two of them( young peters full back!) were better than what played on Saturday.

if we don't put out the best 15 minors in the county, then the end game is a guaranteed poor campaign. who is at fault?