Laois Ladies set to welcome Louth to Crettyard for first league game of 2025

Stephen Duff and his Laois Ladies team will be hoping that they can finally get their Division 3 campaign started after a weather-disrupted weekend saw their game against Carlow called off with both sides togged out and ready for action. Laois will face Louth in Crettyard with the away side having lost against Cavan by two points in their opening round contest.

Louth finished sixth in Division 3 in 2024 with seven points to their name, two wins, one draw and four losses. The Wee County also narrowly missed out on winning the All-Ireland Junior Championship Final when Fermanagh recorded a 1-11 to 0-12 victory in Croke Park. They did end up with some silverware in 2024 when they defeated Carlow in Portlaoise to be crowned TG4 Leinster Junior champions.

Duff and his Laois team will be looking to right all the wrongs that Laois experienced in 2024 as Laois failed to win a match in the league or the championship. They did manage a draw against Tyrone in the league but that's as good as it got before Laois were relegated to Division 3.

The Leinster Senior Championship didn't go in Laois' favour either with three losses against Dublin, Kildare and Meath. The All-Ireland Championship saw Laois drawn against Cork and Galway but they were hammered on both occasions conceding 13-35 in the process.

That left them in the relegation side of the championship with Tipperary having 11 points to spare over them which left Laois and Kildare in the Relegation Play-Off. Laois left their best performance of 2024 until the Kildare game but a late penalty from Neasa Dooley sent Laois down to the Intermediate grade for 2025.

Duff spoke to the Leinster Express/ Laois Live before the Carlow game that didn't go ahead in the end. "

“There's a lot to be learned from last year. It was an awful experience, but it's still an experience. I wouldn't have known Emily Lacey that well until last year. She's a special talent, performing now for her college UCC as well. So that's something we've learned. Aishling Fitzpatrick got the opportunity to play last year because of the situation and she's coming on so much as a player as well. She’s not someone I would have known other than I managed against her at Junior level with Portlaoise. There are different things like that. Girls got opportunities to prove themselves and some girls took their opportunities.

The likes of Aoife Gorman as well, she’s another girl and she's injured now at the minute, but I wouldn't have known a huge amount about her before. The same with Ava Shanahan,” he said.

“I think coming up to that Kildare game, as much as we believed in ourselves, I don't think too many people believed we might get a result and we very nearly did. It proved to us that we were, even with that team that we had last year, good enough to compete with the worst of Senior if we had ourselves in good shape the whole way through the year. Now, whether we did or didn't by the end of the year is different, but we managed to get a performance out of them and showed us that we should be well able to compete at Intermediate level. I think we are and the additions to the group will definitely help that as well,” Duff said.

Speaking about Laois’ upcoming Division 3 campaign, Duff is going to take it game by game.

“It's taking it game by game. We're confident if we perform in Division 3 we should win Division 3. The battle that we have is with ourselves because if we go chasing wins and chasing outcomes that's not going to be constructive for us doing anything. The pressure will start to build or if we were to lose our first game, motivation drops. What we're saying to ourselves as a group is if we perform we win. We're fighting with ourselves to get a performance out of ourselves every week and we know that if we do that we'll win. For the championship, it might be a little bit different. We might need to look at a couple of other teams who would be at the same level as ourselves and we would think that maybe if we perform 90% of the time we'll win. For definite in the league if we perform we win,” Duff said.

Putting in a good performance is a must every time Laois steps onto the field and if they don’t perform like he knows they can, they’ll get no reward for that such is the tight margins in Division 3.

“It's about putting together a performance and then if we don't win it's not because we were shit it's more because we didn't perform. Let's isolate why we didn't perform and let's fix that and let's go to the next week. It's seven games and it's such an opportunity to improve the group. If I had seven games last year, I would have bitten your hand off for it. To be able to go into a league with the players that we have and build a system we have it's brilliant but I'm not going to put it down to results. ‘Should Laois be getting out of Division 3?’ Yes, absolutely and we need to hold ourselves accountable to that. We're going to do it on a week-by-week basis and I'm standing by the principle that if we perform we win,” he said.

Laois and Louth will throw-in at 2pm on Sunday, February 2 in Crettyard GAA.