Brendan O’Brien
LITTLE did we in Laois know at the time, but the bad times were actually the good times.
Back in the 1980s, the midland county was a player on the country’s hurling fields.
Not a power, but a player nevertheless.
In people like John Taylor they had one of the finest wing-backs ever to hold a stick. They had Pat Critchley who won the county’s only ever hurling All Star in 1985 and a whole host of other men — Bohanes, Brophys and Cuddys — who could mix it with the big boys. In every sense.
And every now and again, Laois did more than rattle the blue bloods. In 1984, they beat Galway and Kilkenny on the way to the one-off Centenary Cup final before Cork – them again – dished out a merciless hammering in the decider at Croke Park.
Punctured promises: they would pockmark the county’s decade.
In 1981 and ‘82, Laois contested successive league semi-finals against Offaly and Kilkenny, losing the first by ten points and running the Cats to the narrowest of margins in Thurles a year later but it was Offaly who haunted them more.
Whether true or not, the perception has always been that it was Laois’ misfortune to see their best team in decades emerge at a time when their neighbours were set to rock the hurling establishment to its core.
Nothing said that louder than the 1985 Leinster final, Laois’ first in over 50 years, but one that proved traumatic in the extreme as Offaly scored five goals on the way to another ten-point win at Croke Park.
Offaly went on to claim their second All-Ireland title that September and added two more in the 1990s, a decade in which Laois would go nine years without a single championship success before a win over Westmeath stopped the rot in 1999.
Yet even then, there were shafts of light amidst the gloom.
In 1995, Tipperary had edged a league semi-final in Nowlan Park by just two points and the same, agonising margin separated Laois from Kilkenny when the sides met in the Leinster Championship some weeks later.
Make no mistake, the county was still prone to cascading defeats. That near thing against Kilkenny was sandwiched by 18- and 13-point summer hammerings against Wexford and Offaly but nothing prepared us for Saturday’s nadir against Cork in the qualifiers.
10-20? Mortifying.
Brendan Fennelly held nothing back afterwards, painting a depressing picture of a situation where playing for your county is greeted as some sort of chore rather than the privilege it should be and is for most other players around the country.
That the club is king in Laois is apparent from the all-too-regular bouts of violence that have erupted and been splashed over the national newspapers in years past.
A drop of that passion, properly harnessed, would go a long way for the county team right now.
Source: http://feeds.examiner.ie/~r/iesportsblog/~3/GIPwyGLyg2M/post.aspx
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