When only four Portarlington players showed up for training one Sunday morning back in March, to say things were bleak would be an understatement.
They also lost their first league game to Portlaoise, 5-15 to 0-6, after struggling to even get a team on the field.
Pat Roe had taken over as manager in the off-season after Anthony Cunningham and more than two-thirds of the starting team that had won three Laois SFC titles in a row weren’t playing for a variety of reasons.
Some had retired, more had emigrated – five players who had played senior championship football with Laois in recent years were in Australia.
That three-in-a-row success, achieved less than 18 months earlier, seemed a long way away. Getting back up the steps of the O’Moore Park stand to lift the Jack Delaney Cup again seemed even further.
“They were very, very keen to recover from last year which was very disappointing for the club,” says Pat Roe in this week’s Laois Football Podcast when he chats about how the job came about – and why he decided to take it on despite the long list of absentees.
“I’d looked at the Portarlington team and even with lads gone away, I just looked at the players they had and I said there is the core of a decent team still here.”
But he acknowledges that the early days were tough and that numbers were incredibly low in the pitch.
“Very difficult,” he adds. “We met in January and I spoke to the players and I said, ‘the club has brought me in for one purpose and one purpose only and that is to win a county championship. That’s what I’m here for – I’ll train you and coach you for that’.
“(We’d a) couple of lads involved with county. Lads who were away in college, some lads still playing soccer. A certain amounted accounted for but really a lot of it was it was a general sense I think of not believing we could win a championship.
“If you ask for a pivotal point of the season, we had one morning where we had four training. It was towards the end of March.
“The players had a meeting and decided that something had to change and it had to change coming from them. Then I had a meeting with the players after that. We had a very, very strong conversation.
“We had a real heart-to-heart about what we wanted to achieve and things started to pick up from there.
“Our first league match was against Portlaoise and we were beaten by 20-something points. It was disappointing from the point of view that we barely had a team. But I was looking, even at that performance, that we had a core group of players who could match up against anyone.
“(We) played Stradbally then and lost by a point – a game we were five points up in and controlling. We got a couple of injuries and had a couple of lads that could only stand there. But I could see something in it. Once we righted the ship, our performances improved.”
Though they were relegated from the league, albeit in controversial circumstances which he speaks about in the interview, they found their way in the championship, beating Ballyroan-Abbey in the quarter-final and Graiguecullen in the semi-final to set up a final showdown with Portlaoise.
It all culminated with an emphatic Portarlington win, and a fourth triumph in five years.
Through that time, Roe had to deal with the unusual situation of three of the Australian-based county players – Colm Murphy, Paddy O’Sullivan and Robbie Piggott – returning to link up with the panel.
With minimum training with the group, Roe and his management team had to balance their reintroduction with the players who had kept the show on the road throughout the season.
“It was the first time I’ve ever been faced with something like that. It was quite an unusual one. That doesn’t sit comfortably with me. We got to county final, chiefly because of the lads who stayed around, who got us into a position to win a county final.
“It was a very difficult choice but ultimately it came from the players. The players came and said ‘can we consider this’.”
The players’ previous commitment to Portarlington and the commitment in making the long journey home was also hugely relevant.
“Those players abroad had always committed. It’s not that they’d said ‘we’re not playing this year’ and came back for a final … you have to understand – it was a huge commitment to travel around the world.
“For the quarter-final, Paddy O’Sullivan came home on the Tuesday and went back on Sunday. Colm Murphy came home before the semi-final and stayed until after the final.
“On both occasions Paddy came home on his own. I know his partner remained there, the same with Colm. I couldn’t speak highly enough of them.”
In a wide-ranging interview, we also discuss his playing career, his deep disappointment at never landing the Laois senior manager’s job and why he wouldn’t work with Laois at any level again.
You can listen to the episode in full here.
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