Has Micko's momentum topped out?

Brendan O'Brien wonders where to now for Laois and their All-Ireland dream.

TWO years ago Laois lost to Armagh in an All-Ireland quarter-final but learned enough about themselves to suggest they had only just arrived at the base camp of their ambitions.

Twenty-four months on, having exited the championship at the same stage, against the same opposition, that two-point defeat in 2003 threatens to be the summit of this side's achievements.

Momentum is an elusive commodity in sport and Laois lost some that first time against Joe Kernan's men and a lot more besides the following season with traumatic defeats to Westmeath and Tyrone.

The question now - among many others - is whether they have it within themselves to pick up the pace again after this year's morale-sapping defeats to Dublin and Armagh. Much of that will depend on Mick O'Dwyer. As The Clash wondered, should he stay or should he go?

His impact in the county since arriving in August of 2002 has been undeniable but, having seen a clutch of his marquee players fail to do themselves justice on Saturday, O'Dwyer may yet decide himself that he has mined the county for all it is worth.

"Everybody is going to have to sit back now and take a look at where Laois are," said goalkeeper Fergal Byron. "It's a difficult [defeat] to swallow. Micko has come in and done tremendous work here and got us to three Leinster finals in a row.

"Maybe we're unlucky not to have three Leinster medals in our pockets. If we had, this mightn't seem so bad. We only have one though and we haven't made it to the semi-final on any occasion.

"That's beyond belief for a team with players of the talent we have. It's happened though and the county board will have to sit down, see where it went wrong and it'll be up to them as to how they'll want to advance it from here."

Chris Conway fields the same question and lets out a deep sigh, the thoughts of pre-season training sessions in the cold, dark Portarlington nights proving an unwelcome and premature intrusion into his thoughts.

"As a group of players it's probably back to the drawing board. It's back to the hard slog of getting ready for another year. I suppose if people look at us now and compare us to two years ago they'll probably say we haven't come much further.

"In between, we've left two Leinster finals behind us that should have been won. When people look back on this season though, apart from this [defeat], they'll look back on the Leinster final as the one that got away."

In that, Conway may well have hit the nail on the head. Maybe Laois are aiming for the stars when they should be setting their sights closer to terra firma. Leinster has been well within their compass this past three years and maybe that should be the ceiling for their thoughts the in years to come.

"The players expect to be up there themselves," said Byron. "There's no doubt about it. The players are there in Laois. The quality is there but we haven't got it in abundance. There isn't a huge population in Laois and it's halved by hurling as well.

"Up in Armagh that isn't the case. They're almost solely dedicated to football. We have the best 30 players in Laois on the panel and we have to make the best of what we have.

"If that's making Leinster finals then hopefully we can win them in the future, maybe some day make the breakthrough. It's going to be difficult. There's no doubt about that."

For all their flair in possession, Laois are struggling due to a lack of physique. One look at the pre-match parade on Saturday was evidence enough of that.

"We're not overly big," admitted Byron. "I know Armagh have a few small players, but they are huge as well, if you know what I mean. There's very little you can do. Sometimes you have a bunch of payers that you can beef up but we depend on football.

"If the football isn't going well then what do you depend on after that? Maybe you need to have an alternative. On Saturday, we had the possession, we had the chances and we didn't convert them. When that didn't happen it was always going to be dogged and physical against Armagh.

"We ran at them as best we could and they just soaked up all the pressure. They have the strength and the size to do that. There was just no way back."

The positives? First and foremost, this is still a young Laois team. Only Byron is over the 30-mark and those in their mid-20s have more than earned their battle ribbons over the past lengthy campaigns.

They've also won another All-Ireland and two Leinster titles at the minor grade. The basic ingredients are still there, finding the formula remains the greatest imponderable.

"There's still a lot of young lads in this team and the minor teams have been successful as well," said Conway. "The talent is definitely there but I genuinely felt that this year we were going to make a big push, which would have ensured the momentum a lot longer than the next five years.

"There's great support, there's great support from the county board and there's great players coming through. For some of the older players time is running out."