Clancy relishes low-key build-up

Leinster football final:The first Pádraig Clancy knew about last year's Dublin-Laois result was at tea-time in hospital. He had departed the match after the first quarter with the match relatively balanced. In his absence - and he disputes the cause and effect - Laois disintegrated.

"I was gone after 20 minutes. I hurt my shoulder and only heard the result at half six in the Mater. It's not nice to hear.

"I've a lot of good friends playing ball and we all train together like club mates in some sort of ways. So it wasn't nice to hear the mauling we were after getting.

"At the end of the day they were a point a man better than us. It's not a nice feeling to be going down the M50 after getting a mauling like that playing in front of 82,500 people."

The tall centrefielder and occasional wing forward was speaking at yesterday's provincial finals' launch, held in the Dublin headquarters of sponsors Bank of Ireland, ahead of the weekend's Leinster and Ulster deciders.

Laois meet Dublin for a third season running and Sunday's Croke Park sell-out will be the team's second final in three years. From a Laois perspective, last year's thrashing, 3-17 to 0-12, in the provincial semi-final is a sorrowful mystery.

"I don't know," says Clancy when asked what went wrong.

"A lot of people nearly had us favourites going into the game, built us up as a great Laois team, which we weren't really.

"It's hard to know what happened but Dublin smelled blood and it's a credit to them, they stayed going and pulled away from us."

The team is under new management this year. Having had the guidance of the legendary Mick O'Dwyer for the past four years, Laois are now in the charge of another Kerry man, Liam Kearns. It's a hard act to follow but there is a feeling in the county, for all the rapture that greeted Dwyer's leading them to a first Leinster title in 57 years, that there had been under-achievement as well during those years.

"Four finals in five years and just one title isn't really good enough, for all the underage medals the boys have won," according to Clancy.

"This year we haven't really performed for a full 70 minutes the way we can.

"When Micko was in charge we were always being written up as one of the top four, five, six teams in the country. Now we've slipped out of that and it's been very low profile all year.

"We could have nearly made the National League semi-final and still there was nothing being said about us, which is nearly a better way to be going into the game."

Asked about the main lessons of the past four years he's quick to identify the distraction of media coverage and the very public elevation of the team's chances. He almost welcomes the revision of the side's credentials that he believes has been ongoing this season.

"This is our fourth final in five years. In the past couple of years a lot of people have been putting us favourites going into big games when we really weren't doing it on the pitch. When you're reading that kind of s***e it can get into your head that you're better than you are.

"This year has been more low-key and now the pundits are saying how bad we are and how we're going backwards. We'll have that in our minds going into Sunday."