We’re seen as bottom tier now but there is a chance of moving up
Former Laois star Chris Conway discusses how O’Moore men can return to football’s top table
LAST NIGHT, to coin a phrase that has been a theme of the 2023 Gaelic football season, Laois got the band back together. Peig’s Bar in Portlaoise was the venue for a loose, informal gathering of the 2003 crew who set the summer alight and spanned the generations by winning a first Leinster senior football title in 57 years.
Mick O’Dwyer was the gilded Kerry leader then, bringing the county on an unforgettable, titlewinning odyssey, as only he could – just as he did with Kildare previously. And Chris Conway was one of those along for a wild joyride that would have sparked a night of laughs and craic and reminiscing.
Speaking ahead of this afternoon’s county final between St Joseph’s and Portlaoise, he talks about the past, present and future of Laois football. It’s only recently that he was part of Billy Sheehan’s senior management team that endured a
Micko came in and transformed our fortunes... we probably left a few behind us
rollercoaster season: cruelly pipped for National League promotion from Division 4 on points difference; victors over Wexford before being floored by Dublin in Leinster; bouncing back with gutsy wins on the road in the Tailteann Cup against Fermanagh and Limerick before a semi-final blow-out against Down.
His old Laois teammate Brian ‘Beano’ McDonald was also part of Sheehan’s backroom team. The pair were part of the 1996 Laois minor team that got the better of a fancied Kerry side in the All-Ireland final. Just lost out to Kerry in the All-Ireland under-21 final of 1998. Consummate ball-players both of them, ‘Beano’ already a household name.
Back then, anything seemed possible. Conway won a Leinster senior football winner’s medal in 2003, but unfortunately missed the team’s victory over Kildare after a groin tear. A Laois senior football county medal won with his club Arles- Kilcruise later that same year helped make up for that. In the 2004 Leinster final, he kicked the equaliser against Westmeath only to end up missing the replay after being hospitalised with appendicitis. Laois lost by two points.
That was a time when Leinster felt like a raffle where everyone had a ticket.
‘Everyone felt that if they had their own house in order they’d have a proper crack at it,’ says Conway. ‘Even for ourselves, when Micko came in it was like a high tide that lifted all boats. He saw the talent that was in the county. In ’99 we should have beaten Dublin – they got a dubious equaliser. We might have been able to make the breakthrough even quicker at that stage. A lot of us would have been still in our final year of under-21 in ’99. Things didn’t look so rosy then at the end of 2002 when we lost heavily to Meath in the back door. Micko came in then and transformed our fortunes relatively quickly. We probably left a couple behind us.
‘Micko had gone across to Manchester in his younger days. Saw them train very hard in pre-season but after that when the football started that’s all they were doing – playing football. It wasn’t too dissimilar. The myth would have been out there that Micko would have been flogging us. He brought great energy and a buzz and a huge profile.
‘We had strength in depth with the conveyor belt of talent coming through and what was there before. He harnessed that, we won our first Leinster. In 2004 Westmeath came and pipped us in a replay.’
Conway’s misfortune was to miss out in cruel circumstances. ‘I was captain in ’04 because our club were lucky enough to win the county title in ’03. After kicking the equaliser in the drawn game I was out for the replay with appendicitis – actually got it taken out the day before the final, which was a replay on a Saturday evening which is a rare thing. It didn’t happen for us in the replay. 2005 we came back, felt hard done by in the Leinster final against Dublin when a few hard decisions went against us after we came from six points down and went up by a point. Didn’t get the decisions. They did.
‘In ’06 we were actually two points up against Mayo in the All-Ireland quarter final. That was definitely options taken on the field let us down rather than anything on the sideline or the referee. We should have held on that day. Unfortunately got beaten in the replay. And that was the end of the Micko era.
‘Things unfortunately for one reason or another have gone slowly downhill since.’
Between 2000 and 2004, five different counties lifted the Cup – coincidentally named the Delaney Cup for the first time at the start of 2004 in honour of the famous footballing family from Laois. Those counties were Kildare, Meath, Dublin, Laois, Westmeath, in that order. From 2005, it’s been the sort of anti-competitive Dublin monopoly that an EU commission might look at.
So how did it change? Dublin reorganised and arrived with the perfect storm of a CEO in John Costello with a vision and drive and strategy, plus the coaching and games model
and central funding to back it up. Laois had a golden generation of players gradually drift away.
‘How did it switch? The production of players from clubs or the same standard of player wasn’t being produced,’ posits Conway. ‘You’d have hoped with the success of the underage in the 90s and noughties and then the se nior success that it would create another conveyor belt of kids coming through but it hasn’t happened.
‘The current style of football probably doesn’t suit Laois’s traditional style of attacking play maybe as well. That’s maybe a factor over the last number of years. There was some success with it under Justin McNulty, we got back to an All-Ireland quarter-final against Dublin [in 2012] and that. But the high points have been fleeting. Trips to Jones Road have become less common.’
The Knockbeg College schoolteacher – who has spent the last 20 years shaping the minds and football strengths of a generation of players – has been on the ground coaching, doing his best to alter that. In 2020, he received an award at Carlow GAA’s annual awards in recognition of his huge contribution to secondary schools GAA.
But given how last season with the seniors was such a rollercoaster, where now Laois football? Particularly when the vacant management position speaks volumes about the challenge.
‘The last couple of years, we have been very unlucky in the league, to even end up in Division 4 in the first place. We went down on a head-to-head even though our score difference was much better after getting five points in Division 3. Same in Division 4, we lost out on promotion on a head-tohead even though our score difference again would have been a lot higher.
‘The unfortunate side of that is that the county is seen as in the basement tier. They’re obviously on the lookout for new management at the moment. It might be seen as not the most attractive offer but at the same time I’d feel there is a realistic chance of getting promotion and even successive promotions. Last year we beat Louth away in the first round and they went on to gain promotion. This year we beat Sligo away in the first round as well – both gained promotion subsequently.
‘It was disappointing this year. The lads up in Carrick-on-Shannon kicked 18 points on a wet miserable day on a heavy pitch, played some real good football, but lost out to Leitrim. A couple of tight games didn’t go our way with one and two point defeats costing us.
‘In Championship, Dublin got the whirlwind start that everyone would fear. We’d beaten Wexford in the Leinster championship, regrouped in the Tailteann Cup. Successive victories away to Fermanagh and in Limerick but in the Down game the concession of early goals put us on the back foot. The week-on-week
There’s a realistic chance of a promotion, even successive promotions
matches came against us then in terms of the physical toll.’
Of the Leinster championship, he tries to piece together how every other county has been left to struggle in Dublin’s slipstream from a time when it used to be ultra-competitive. ‘Unfortunately it has gone to the complete other extreme. There’s no doubt about it, the population that Dublin has gives them a certain advantage, especially when they’re doing everything right on and off the field.
‘A lot of it does come back to clubs as well and what they’re producing, the work that GDA’s [Games Development Administrators] are doing. It’s probably only something that is being rolled out in Laois over the last few years. And they’re even struggling to hold on to some of those in key positions for continuity and development.’
And yet, with the county final on this afternoon, there is still a sense that the champions of Laois can really compete at provincial level. The competition still has such appeal because there is room for the Mullinalaghtas of this world to steal a march, as the Longford champions did against Kilmacud Crokes in 2018.
‘That’s the beauty of the club championship that when the scene is set like David and Goliath it’s possible for the underdog to come through.’ Twenty years ago, Laois weren’t so much the underdog but instead, felt like equal partners in a gloriously unpredictable Leinster championship.
The question now is whether those days will ever return.