Sam Mulroy says he wants to “leave a legacy” in Louth by setting the county on a different path after years of underachievement.
Under Mickey Harte, Louth have achieved successive League promotions and last weekend’s victory over arch rivals Meath in Navan leaves them nicely placed to stay in Division Two with Kildare visiting Ardee in a crunch tie this Sunday.
However, Louth have reached Division Two under local managers Peter Fitzpatrick, now county board chairman, and Colin Kelly in the last decade or so and not been able to push on from there, with the success-starved county without a major title at senior level since the 1957 All-Ireland success.
Top scorer Mulroy is one of their brightest talents and has continued to flourish under the stewardship of Harte, who has made him captain.
He said: “We’ve spoken about it with Louth - can we leave a legacy? Can we change something here? Maybe when I look back in 10 or 15 year’s time, when hopefully I’m sailing off into the sunset, that I might be more proud of what happened but at the minute no it’s not a case of being proud or anything.
“I think it’s a journey that we need to be on and hopefully it keeps going in the right direction more than anything.
“For Louth it’s probably a case of probably changing the narrative around Louth GAA. I think it’s massively important that for us as a team and us as a generation of players can leave Louth in a better position than we got it,” he told GPA podcast The Players’ Voice.
“Hopefully that’s Louth competing in Division One and Two comfortably. For me, that’s massively important. And then I think we need to become more of a Championship team.
“I don’t think we’ve played well in the Championship. We have not got past the [Leinster] quarter final in probably 10 years which is just not good enough.
“I think if we got to a Leinster final or we won a Delaney Cup it would obviously be madness here for a week or two.
“That’s where my head is at and where the teams’ heads are at. Can we change that over the next five or 10 years?”
Mulroy explained how he resolved to maximise his potential as a footballer after missing out on Louth’s last stint in Division Two through injury in 2018 and admitted that he had been coasting along prior to that.
“All I wanted to do when I was younger was obviously to play for Louth. To get in there then, I was just so happy to just be there and I coasted for probably a year or two and was nearly wanting to be on teams but not wanting to play because I felt so much pressure that if I was in there, that I wasn’t good enough and that I was just happy to be there.
“That was the biggest thing. I just love Louth GAA. My family loves Louth GAA. We travelled all over the country to see Louth for years. So to get in there I probably just coasted for a few years and I probably had a little bit of a breakthrough then.
“I dislocated my ankle and Pete McGrath came in and Louth were in Division Two and I missed out on that and I suppose that kind of flicked a switch.
“Louth didn’t win a game that year and the next year I played decent enough football and I was starting most matches and it just was a flick of the switch in terms of mentality to what I wanted from being an inter-county footballer.
“It was like, ‘If I’m going to put in all this time and effort and go to all the training sessions I’m going to make them worthwhile’. That’s been a learning curve.”
Mulroy is unquestionably Louth’s best known footballer at present and admits that that status can be taxing at times.
“You play to play well and to make headlines and as a young fella that’s all you want, for people to know your name and to talk about you and say ‘wasn’t Sam great today or didn’t he score x, y or z or he’s doing this, he’s doing that’.
“I suppose when you’re younger you’re wishing for that and sometimes when you get to it, you’d wish it would go away sometimes. It’s been funny. Some days have been great. Some days have been bad.
“And I suppose when people put you up there, there’s people that want to knock you down as well.
“From my side it’s been about trying to park it a little bit and block out the noise because at the end of the day there’s a bigger picture in terms of our team and Louth GAA as a whole.
“If I represent that then happy days and I’m willing to do that. I’ll do it to the best of my ability but for me it’s important that it’s not just about Sam Mulroy. So that’s kind of been a massive learning curve.
“As I said, when you’re young, maybe you want to be about yourself but as I’ve grown older and wiser I think it’s definitely been more about how I can and play my part in making Louth be successful and great I suppose.”
