Laois hurling manager Seamus 'Cheddar' Plunkett says Sunday's Leinster Qualifier Group clash against Carlow is now a 'knockout' game after their opening-round defeat to Antrim.
Laois lost to a last-minute penalty in Ballycastle last weekend and can't afford to slip up against the Barrowsiders tomorrow if they're to grab one of the two places on offer in the Leinster Championship to the four-team group.
"Obviously when you don't win and particularly when you're hit with a sucker punch with the last strike of the game, there's huge disappointment," he told RTÉ Sport.
"But we're sort of lucky that we've had seven days to turn around the disappointment and go out against Carlow. This is a knockout championship match at this stage. We have to win it.
"Carlow had a very close run with Westmeath up in Mullingar. We know over the years that Westmeath are difficult to beat up in Mullingar so there's going to be nothing between us on Sunday.
"It's a local derby and in local derbies anything can happen. The match is at Dr Cullen Park as well, so we've a big challenge ahead of us.
"We'll certainly be giving it everything we can. If we could come out of that with a point, then we'll be delighted because it would get us back on track to have a go at Westmeath a fortnight after that."
Plunkett admits that not qualifying for the provincial championship proper would be a huge disappointment, especially after some strong performances in Leinster in recent years and the retention of Division 1B status in the league.
"There would be huge consequences for everybody I suppose," he said. "Everybody has worked so hard to try and get us into a competitive situation and I think we're in that at the minute.
"We would have to win that game for the team to develop and to keep moving on. It's a huge game for us but I suppose for the development of hurling in Laois, it's great that your flagship team would do well."
"We came out of the league with two points. Last year we came out with four points, went into a quarter-final against Clare so that margin is not very big.
"We want to push on. We've worked really hard at pushing on. We've changed little things this year.
"We're a small county with a small pool of players. We're working really, really hard to develop that base of players and hopefully over the next couple of years that that's what will happen.
"So we're very, very keen to keep working really hard and working really smart and the result next Sunday would be very helpful to us."
Plunkett insists that Laois still have ambitions of challenging the more established teams in Leinster but says they must focus on consistently performing to their ability first.
“In an ideal world it would be great to tweak our team, keep improving our performance match on match and then go into the Leinster quarter-finals and take down one of these teams but every team is preparing professionally and there is very little difference in how teams prepare at this stage," he said.
"So you don't have much chance to look at things and you've got to give it your best shot in every match.
“The way the draw is made this year, the team that wins the round robin plays Offaly, the runners-up play Wexford. We don't really mind who we play, we don't have preferences for any team to be honest with you. We're just delighted to be playing hurling.
"We'd love to have won the round robin. A little bit of that is outside of our hands now but we'll certainly be doing everything we can to turn all of that around and get ourselves going again.”
