Mullaney prays for somelight at the end of tunnel

REPRESENTING your county can open many doors but, as Laois hurling captain Padraig Mullaney has found out this season, the price of failure can be a heavy one.

So far, it has been a dismal season for the midlanders under new manager Dinny Cahill. All of their seven league games were lost, the most crushing was the relegation final defeat to Down, which consigned them to Division Two.

Though no more than 50 fans attended that game, in Navan, Mullaney felt the full wrath of the ‘armchair mob’ when he attempted to wind down that evening back home in Castletown.