O’Loughlin finds winning recipe with Laois

Brendan O’Brien

Under normal circumstances,

Declan O’Loughlin would probably be bracing himself for the onslaught as his hotel on Main Street bears the brunt of much of the stampede.

For now though all other thoughts have long been shunted aside by the approach of today’s All-Ireland quarter-final with Armagh.

The Laois selector is bent over the bar counter fiddling impatiently with a remote control. It’s a futile attempt to play a DVD of the qualifier against Derry on the flat screen behind the counter.

“Do you know anything about DVDs?,” he asks. The unfortunate barman (he has obviously witnessed this scene before) is at his wits end

explaining technological mysteries like ‘compatibility’ to his clearly frustrated boss.

Three years ago, O’Loughlin had to be virtually coerced into taking up the role as one of Mick O’Dwyer’s sideline lieutenants. Now, it’s a drug that just won’t let him go. The golf handicap has somehow shot up from a six

to a ten and the tennis shoes aren’t as beat up as they should either.

O’Loughlin is now the man the media call for team news and other titbits. Ask his predictions for Laois matches and he never fails to stick a finger in the air and see which way the wind is blowing first.

“It can get crazy on weeks like this,” he says. It isn’t just the media either. You get calls from Laois people abroad asking you who’s fit and who’s playing. You don’t mind though, it’s only a few weeks a year and the more publicity the games get the better.”

Having so much emotion invested in this Laois team surprises him more than anyone else. Thirty years ago, as an 18-year old, he played minor, U21 and senior football for the county in both hurling and football but a serious knee injury severed his career and his formal connections with the county set-up.

After that, he spent some summers alternating between Chicago and New York and he was one of a clutch of people on hand to collect Laois players and supporters at JFK Airport when they toured the States in 1981.

It was around then that O’Loughlin unknowingly sowed the first seeds that would lead to O’Dwyer’s arrival in Laois two decades later.

He was togging out for Kildare club Leixlip at the time and fell in with a playing colleague by the name of Jack O’Shea. Soon the Laois man was accompanying his new friend down to Waterville for 18 holes of golf where he struck up a friendship with the village’s marquee name.

The bond was solidified when O’Dwyer’s hunger for football took him to Kildare. The pair began to hook up more frequently but it was on one of Laois’s darkest days that the possibility of O’Dwyer working with the Midlanders truly fermented.

“It was the day of the qualifier against Meath here in Portlaoise when they hammered us in 2002. Micko called in here (to the hotel) and we walked down to the game. He asked me after why Laois people don’t support Laois.

“There was only 2,000 people at the game and there was no colour. No blue and white. I said, at the moment, they weren’t performing, but we came to the conclusion that, with the minor and U21 successes, the talent was there. It stemmed from there and between hopping and dragging, he ended up taking the job.”

That, thought the Rosenallis man, was that. When O’Dwyer asked him to come on board he replied that there were much better qualified and deserving people of the post.

The response was vintage O’Dwyer leaving O’Loughlin with no outs. “His answer was, ‘you want me to come and train Laois and yet you aren’t prepared to come in as a selector’. We were bartering and I suppose I wasn’t playing ball.”

Their mutual hunch was vindicated in the first year when Leinster was annexed for the first time since 1946. Since then, there’s been more setbacks to stomach than they would have liked, though O’Loughlin believes the stars are again aligning in their favour.

“Armagh are definitely not as good as they were three years ago. Of that there is no doubt,” he says. Laois in contrast are on the last leg of a three-year plan O’Dwyer initially envisaged.

This year sees them tougher, more experienced than the callow crew that lost to Armagh at the same point two years ago. Even the defeat to Dublin has been entered into the ledger’s credit column allowing, as it did, the side to shake the Ulster monkey off their back against Derry.

O’Loughlin doesn’t agree with the notion that defeat today would be this team’s Waterloo, but he understands where the perception comes from. Armagh, he counters, were four or five years knocking on the door before finding their way over the doormat.

The Laois team is sprinkled liberally with players in their early to mid-twenties and the Portlaoise hotelier prefers to contemplate what a win, rather than a defeat, would do for this particular group.

“What it would do for the county and the players, you just couldn’t measure. George Bernard Shaw said that confidence is infectious. In the dressing room after the Offaly game when we got out of jail, you could sense that this team had taken their trump card and wasn’t going to go down easy. I certainly don’t see us going down easy and I see us beating Armagh today.”