Plunkett calls for patience as injury ravaged Laois fight for their Division one lives

Cheddar Plunkett saw his side fall to their second defeat in as many weeks on Saturday evening but he has called for patience and time as he looks to get Laois hurling back on track.

“This is not going to happen quickly, we all know that. There’s a lot of work to do in terms of developing what we want to do, and I suppose when you look at some other counties, you look at Dublin who are on the road three or four years with Mattie (Kenny), last Sunday we played Wexford who are four or five years on the road with Davy (Fitzgerald) and it takes a while to knit things together.”

While it was an eight point defeat, he did see green shoots and thought the performance was improved from the Wexford game the previous week.

“It was improved, I thought we were very competitive, our setup was good, the fact that Dublin played a sweeper the whole of the first half, we put a lot of pressure on them to do that.

“We’re only six days away from last Sunday and the story hasn’t changed from last Sunday, we have to reset our team, if you look at our first team players, the likes of Willie (Dunphy), John (Lennon), Picky (Maher), Eanna (Lyons) and Mark Kavanagh that are missing, that are probably starters on this team, then you’ve got to reshape your team and we probably wanted to do that anyway, and we need to look at developing our style of play and normally in any year you’d have three or four months to work on that, and three or four challenge matches as well, but this is only our second game, with three weeks training before we met the team.”

The other teams in the league are coming from a better base and given the Covid-19 restrictions that have been in place leading to the lack of preparation, the injuries and the fact that they are a new management team, Plunkett is fully focused on staying in Division 1 for the development of Laois hurling going forward.

“We’re developing from a very different base, sometimes you’ve got to properly contextualise things, if you look at this Dublin team there are certainly a lot of them that would have Minor or U-21 Leinster's and All-Irelands and Wexford last week that would have played in All-Ireland U-21 finals.

“We haven’t got that base to work off of, so we’ve got to develop our players and our team an awful lot more than other counties have to do, and we’ve got to take our time at doing that.

“We’ve got to be patient, we have a fantastic group of players here, I couldn’t ask for more out of our team, it’s just going to take time to get these things right.

“The unfortunate part of it is we are playing in a high performance setting week in, week out, which is great to test yourself if you’re nearly formed but that’s going to be tough.

“We really want to stay in this Division to test ourselves, but it may be next year before we’re really ready for that, so we really want to stay in this Division if we can.”

They have it all to do to stay in Division 1 and there next test is only around the corner as they take on Clare this Sunday (3pm) in Portlaoise.

Clare are in a similar position with no wins on the board meaning the loser on Sunday's game will be odds on to feature in a relegation playoff.