Driving force Kelly revels in change of roles for Laois

MENTION Tom Kelly in Laois and they will talk about attitude. The centre-back is supposed to have the right helping of the stuff, for the game and for life.

That has not always been the case with footballers in the county, so maybe that is why he stands out.

And this year, he has been standing out as the driving force in the Laois defence. Used as a corner-back in the league, Micko and his backroom knew they needed to tinker with the team by half-time against Offaly, come championship time. A change was proposed for Kelly. He was slotted in at centre-back. He and Laois haven’t looked back since.

But this year hasn’t been one for looking back. It has been a roller-coaster ride that Kelly hadn’t been used to since minor days. Heading deep into July now and Laois are still here, in a Leinster final, with neither a Dublin or Meath team in sight.

“If you had told me at the start of the year we would reach a Leinster final, I would have laughed at you. But, the lads see how close we were now, we put in the work this year and it has paid off.”

While Micko has been a big factor in the transformation, Kelly says a change of attitude is perceptible this summer.

“Micko has made a big difference, I mean the managers before were all right, it was just everyone wasn’t here, everyone wasn’t interested in playing for Laois. Before, there were lads missing, lads weren’t putting it in because they knew they could get away with it. Micko made it clear early on that if you didn’t put the work in, you wouldn’t get away with it.”

Kelly wasn’t a player to miss a training session, but the absentees affected him and the lads that did turn up.

“If you saw other lads missing, you would start to question what you were doing yourself. It’s only natural. When I am training I want to see 30 lads there. If I am putting in the work, everyone should be putting in the work.

“It was frustrating and hard and you asked yourself why you were doing it. And what made it even harder was there was all this expectation around, because we were good minors, people just thought good minors made good seniors. If you look at the team, there are only 12 minors that came out of 60. That’s a big fall-out rate.”

Kelly was never going to fall by the wayside, though. Not long after he graduated onto the senior panel, he was the subject of experimentation. Although he was a flying wing-forward in the 97 minor team, the Laois senior management had different ideas. Laois had a perennial problem at full-back. Kelly was thought to be the best stop-gap solution.

“It was a hard position to get used. I never played back there before and I found myself drifting out, trying to join the attack.”

When Micko arrived on the scene, he was shifted into the corner. O’Dwyer has a fondness for speedy corner-backs in the mould of Joe Higgins and Kelly. He didn’t like it, but went with it because it was all the best for Laois. It was only at half-time in the Offaly game that the best centre-back in Laois at last played centre-back for the county team.

And it was there he exerted such an influence on Laois’ ground-breaking victory over Dublin. That display garnered him Vodafone’s player of the month award.

“I like centre-back, you can go forward, you can sweep up breaks, in the corner, you have to follow a lad, and you can get caught.”

Kelly is basking in his longest summer with Laois. Somehow the drives up from Gorey, where he is a carpenter, have seemed shorter with a Leinster final on the horizon. All those years thinking next Sunday would never come.

Like most of this Laois team, Kelly did a tour of duty in the States, a summer kicking football with Stephen McDonnell in Chicago. It was a common practice among Laois footballers in recent years. Knocked out of the championship, answer America’s call. Kelly said there was always something more focused about the panel this year. Once Offaly were vanquished, Kelly could feel the squad mood indicating they were going somewhere.

“Offaly was a massive game for us. If we didn’t beat Offaly, that would be three years in a row that Offaly would have beaten us.

“The pressure was on Dublin, we knew we could do it. Our backs are fairly tight and we knew if Pauric and Noel could control midfield we would win. There was a lot of hype about this Dublin team, but if you broke it down, there wasn’t anything separating ourselves and Dublin.”

Most eyebrows were raised about the way Laois defence played against Tommy Lyons’ boys. Of course, Kelly wasn’t surprised.

“There were always question marks about the defence, we have proved ourselves so far.”

Kelly is from The Swan, a village that edges towards the Kildare border. He doesn’t know any of the Kildare players except Anthony Rainbow and Enda Murphy from his Leinster days.

At last year’s Railway Cup, he fell into conversation with Rainbow.

Kelly told him about all the laps they were doing. Rainbow started laughing. He knew all about them. That Rainbow is on the other side to Micko in a Leinster final will take some getting used to.

But, that is only a small sub-plot on an intriguing afternoon Kelly has spent his senior career waiting for.