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22 Oct 2025
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22 Oct 2025
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Malachy McNulty (left) in his playing days for Portlaoise against Rhode in a Leinster club game
This Sunday will see the Laois senior football semi finals take centre stage in Laois but across the border in Offaly, a Portlaoise man will be aiming to guide Offaly kingpins Rhode to back to back senior football titles.
Portlaoise stalwart Malachy McNulty is at the helm in Rhode and after claiming 2020 glory with the North Offaly club, he is back again aiming to do the double.
They will have familiar opposition too in Tullamore, the team they beat to win the 2020 decider that went ahead last year by the skin of its teeth due to Covid-19 restrictions.
McNulty is a born winner so the fit with Rhode is a good one. A Laois senior football championship winner as a player and manager with Portlaoise, this is not his first rodeo.
Speaking ahead of the game, McNulty praised the hunger and spirit of a Rhode panel that have been in every senior football county final in Offaly since 2012.
“I think with success, players like winning and teams like winning and they want to keep winning. You can hit bad spots in the middle of all that and from time to time and from season to season, but if you have a good attitude and if you challenge players to try to do better every time, I think that is the answer for it. When I arrived in Rhode it was a case of there was definitely a hunger there. It was off the back of a losing a county final to Ferbane.
“I know I certainly felt there was more county titles in them and after meeting all the players, each one individually felt they had more to offer, that they could come back and do it again. Maybe it is something that is just instilled in them here from an early age.
"There is great resilience about them and a great resolve about them. And when you have all those individual attributes, you bring them all together collectively. And that is not to say that a year both on and off the pitch won't have its up and downs, you know the pandemic and people have personal issues to deal with, but you have to keep going for each other and the community here and with that in mind they are just a group of lads that show great resolve time and time again.”
Rhode are blessed to have one of the best forwards in the business in Niall McNamee. In the winter of his career, age is only a number to him and McNulty explains that McNamee is invaluable to the team.
“Niall's experience, his history and his score tallies speak for themselves. It has probably broken records somewhere. The man takes seriously good care of himself, he puts in the extra work to make sure he is able to play at that standard and when he is on fire, he is on fire, but at the same time we are trying to hone in on the collective approach and trying to get all our players into the positions to take their scores. I suppose what you are trying to preach from that point of view is to give the ball to the man in the best position.”
Down the line and depending on results, Portlaoise and Rhode could potentially meet in a Leinster club championship environment but that doesn't come into the equation for McNulty. He is fully honed in on winning the Offaly championship and guiding an injury hit Rhode to more glory.
"I am not thinking about that whatsoever. There is one game and one game only on Sunday and that's been instilled in all our players at the moment. We can't think beyond that. When we started off this year, you might have little dreams of where things might take you but then as Tyson says, you have a plan and then you get a punch in the face and you lose your Jake Kavanagh's and you lose Eoin Rigney and you lose Shane Lowry and Paul McPadden against Shamrocks in the quarter and you are left planning without these guys and you just have to take it as the games go."
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