What really defines social class in the modern era is the way a place looks. Maynooth, Celbridge and Leixlip are all very âproperâ looking. Itâs all trees and grass verges and well kept gardens. You have Carton House, you have Intel, you have The Orchard garden centre and cafe, a sort of Avoca type place where aspirational types go, you have private hospitals and fee paying schools nearby, you have tidy main streets, you have train stations, you have C bus routes, you have a motorway. These are places where aspiration rules. The Pet Shop Boys could have written a song about these places.
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and they would be right to be
I though there was a very good Laois attendance at Croke Park yesterday MBB
Well outnumbered the Kildare support
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There was, Shur we thought weâd just to go up and pick it up. The boys on the hill were hopping
Is is stretching things a bit to say, Laois had as big a representation as anyone on the Hill yesterday?
Nah but Shur what were we up against
Whats the North/Side divide about?
Id say theyâd be incomparable to a place like malahide or greystones or even skerries. A few rungs down from them. Maynooth is fairly posh alright. Leixlip is a bit of a kip by comparison.
Maynooths not bad, but its choked by traffic on its one street
Great insight there
Some variety in the Joe McDonagh winners since its inception in 2018. Carlow, Antrim, Westmeath, Laois, Offaly and Kildare have all won titles with Kerry appearing in a couple of finals too. Whoâll be the next first time winner though? Wexford?
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After a bit of reflection Iâve come to the conclusion this Joe Mc was the weakest since its inception.
Kerry were a rabble under new mgmt and had nowhere near their best 15 available.
Down are a yoyo team between Ring/Joe Mc
Saoirise Bluffin made WM underperform by about 50%. A good team which Joe Fortune showed. However the âdoppleganger Davyâ was such a woeful apoointment.
Laois were probably on backfoot from the word go with the late appointment of TF. League form showed that. However I think Laois are still back in 2015. I donât think the players are committed to the âextrasâ needed for the modern game such as S+C, Nutrition and video analysis. Iâd be confident TF is the man there for the job and will be a success in time.
Carlow were probably the best team in the competition and definately had the best forwards. However a mixture of complacence vs Kildare in the group game and bad luck vs Laois done for them. A lot of their main men have a lot of miles on the clock. Unlike a few other Joe Mc teams they have done nothing at underage in years. Mgmt have been there 5/6 years too. Theyâve done a good job, but maybe a new voice needed.
Kildare were just well organised bu a good mgmt. They have 5/6 very good operators (Boran would possibly play 6 for any Leinster Liam Mc team) but there is a real tail there. More so than any other Joe Mc team they probably maxed out on the âextrasâ needed listed above. They were there to exploit the other teams not at 100%. Thatâs sport and fair play to them. Dublin will open them on Sat.
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Its too early to tell on that one I reckon. This teams best chance is to achieve exactly what they have achieved a few times. Maybe seek to stay in Div 1b but numbers supporting would gradually go if they did.
The county has passion for hurling but its hard to connect without a team to properly follow. Given the youth of this group I think theyâll build a small but incremental fanbase over time.
Football is their biggest challenge in terms of building towards anything else
Most of the other teams in it bar Kildare have had their shot on the merrygoround. Offaly and Antrim who are the two naturally strongest counties among âthe restâ, were both in Leinster this year. Once you go down after being in Leinster, you go down properly.
Iâll be interested to see can Antrim buck that trend next year. They should, but it might depend on whether Davy is still in charge. If heâs not, they could walk back up. If he is, they could even go down again.
Laois voted last night to decouple the McDonagh Cup from the All Ireland Hurling Series. I think everyone knows its not really working, aside from the one time Laois caught Dublin, and this was coming anyway more than likely, but Iâm not sure the aesthetic of Laois proposing and voting for this themselves.
Personally, Iâd have left the winners link and remove the losers game, for at least a year anyway.
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Current system is stupid, but I would have asked for a 12 team Liam Mac instead. Put six in Munster, if Kerry not involved, then someone from Leinster.
Bottom team on each side play relegation final
Laois have lost two McDonaghs in a row, the players are raw from turning up to two skelpings, as were management and I can understand. But Iâd certainly not have volunteered for this.
We could put Wexford into Munster, theyâd slot right in.
Laois is a bit like Wales. It has simply given up.
But Wales could at least point to generations of great rugby teams in the past, of a history of producing great association football players and snooker players and boxers, of producing great singers, producing great, politically aware music, great actors, and titans of politics. They can point to their industrial history. We made stuff. We dug stuff out of the ground. The Welsh accent is a delight.
Even if its towns are now largely boarded up shitholes populated by drug addicts and filled only with Dealz shops, Wales can at least say âwe used to be somethingâ. And who knows, maybe they can be something again in the future. Maybe that giving up is only temporary.
Laois can point to none of that, and their accent is horrific. They gave up without ever achieving anything.
The âitâs shite being Scottishâ bit in Trainspotting was, paradoxically, the product of a fierce Scottish sense of identity. They might often hate it, but they wouldnât trade it.
But every person from Laois would happily trade being from Laois for being from somewhere else.
The words that sum up Laois are âpassiveâ, âapatheticâ, âmeekâ. Laois has no identity. If Laois was a Father Ted character, it would be Father Stone.
Laois doesnât even have âthe most pointless, godforsaken midlands drive through countyâ as an identity, because Longford has that, and thus Longford has some sort of identity, some sort of sense of itself.
Longford has bog and river. Longford has Albert Reynolds and his pet food factory and his country and western dance halls and Eddie Macken and Boomerang and Ann Lovett dying in a grotto. A shit sense of identity, but itâs an identity.
Laois produces two kinds of people. Nodding donkeys, and permanently outraged nutcases who want to see the world burn.
Laois has nothing.
Therefore it is entirely unsurprising they have voted to eliminate themselves from the All-Ireland hurling championship.
I can imagine there being a half way stop, going along with the 2023 vote. It really should just be the winners that advance. In truth it should be a two week gap but with the split season itâs hard to find the gaps needed. But the losers certainly should be let disappear into a bottle for a week and not be bothered.
71% of Joe McDonagh Cup players support winners advancing to All-Ireland hurling series
The issue is up for debate tomorrow at GAAâs Special Congress.
11.08am, 29 Sep 2023
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A LARGE NUMBER of players from the counties which compete in the Joe McDonagh Cup are in favour of the competitionâs link with the Liam MacCarthy Cup remaining, but only for the winners of the competition.
Why should the Joe McDonagh players even have a say they arenât good enough to be there.
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