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10th Mar 2018

Laois player deserves credit for weirdly honest excuse for missing training

Niall McIntyre

The excuse is bad, the lack of remorse is worse.

But all in all, we reckon everybody in this WhatsApp group should be just pleased with the honesty.

Come on, we’ve all had those days. It’s Friday evening, you’re after having a tough week at work. You were out on the town one night and were sleep deprived as a result.

Usually you’re buzzing to get home, you’re hopping out of your skin for a Friday evening training session. But this week was different. For one reason or another, you’re not feeling it and putting yourself through a gruelling training session is actually the last thing in the world you want to do.

That’s when the excuses are usually rolled out. Lads use their imagination and come up with various efforts to dupe their managers and to get themselves away with it and their teammates off their backs.

Sometimes, these lads are found out, more times they get away with it, but at the end of the day the only person you’re fooling is yourself because if you really want to get the best out of yourself in your game, you can’t afford to be missing out on training sessions when you’ve no real reason to.

Being tired after work doesn’t cut the mustard as a justification for missing a training session. That’s not good enough. All players have work. Most of them don’t pay attention to their body’s calls for a break. Those are the sacrifices GAA players make.

It doesn’t cut the mustard, and that’s why you would expect no player would use it as a reason for them to miss out on a session.

But one startlingly honest club hurler in Laois didn’t want to fill his teammates or managers with a made-up excuse. He told the truth and nothing but the truth.

As expected, the player received plenty of flak off his teammates, but when you think about it, there are always lads missing from training sessions who don’t give an excuse or who tell a white lie just to get away with it.

Maybe we’d all be better off if everyone just told the truth? At least we’d have more trust in each other and trust is what a team is all about.

The Laois club can trust their man to tell the truth. Whether they can trust him to give the commitment required is another question.

Here’s the string of messages that was sent into us by his teammate.

Some lads got the excuses in early.

Our man “wanted to rest.”

Predicatbly, he was roasted alive.

Another man’s wife had a baby. Those are the type of excuses we’re looking for.

He wasn’t joking.

This string of messages was sent into us by a player in the WhatsApp group. We blocked out the name of the club and the names and numbers of those involved in the interests of privacy.

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Topics:

Laois GAA