Preview: House looking to continue Leinster journey as Laois champs arrive in Newbridge

Two Mile House v Courtwood (Laois), St Conleth’s Park, Saturday 1.30pm Leinster IFC semi-final It has been a rollercoaster ride for Two Mile House in their Leinster Championship campaign thus far, but they tend to enjoy themselves when they get into the provincial competition. Wins against Westmeath and Dublin opposition came by in very different circumstances, whether that be grinding out a narrow win or blowing away opposition in a tour de force attacking display. After wins over Shandonagh of Westmeath and Dublin’s Round Towers Lusk, Laois champions Courtwood are the next side to come to Newbridge to clip the wings of the high-flying Kildare men. Two Mile House had plenty of injury worries coming into the game against Round Towers just under two weeks ago, with a number of players carrying little niggles into the quarter-final tie. There were some heroic performances in that win as the likes of Mark Sherry, Didier Cordonnier and Jack Collins all turned in superb displays, but Peter Kelly’s haul of 2-2 was instrumental as he continued his brilliant run of form that has been driving his side on over the last number of weeks. Courtwood will certainly provide interesting opposition on Saturday. Just like Two Mile House, Courtwood won all of their games en route to the Laois intermediate title, before their first outing in the Leinster Championship was a quarter-final tie against St Mochta’s of Louth. They travelled to small Louth village club and emerged with a 2-9 to 1-10 win following a tight clash with the Louth champions, and they will arrive in Newbridge with hopes of a similar result on Saturday. The Laois kingpins have plenty of classy attacking ability in their forward line, which has Laois star Niall Donoher as the fulcrum at centre-forward, while there is plenty of young fliers around him to cause opposition defences headaches. Luke Doran has been one of their standout performers this year, and the young forward has heavily scored throughout his side’s run to the last four in Leinster. He scored 1-2 in the county final win over Mountmellick Gaels and three points against St Mochta’s in the Leinster quarter-final, and he will undoubtedly be one of the players that Two Mile House will need to strictly watch on Saturday. Athy boxer Eric Donovan has been working with Courtwood this year as part of the strength and conditioning team, so that adds a slight bit of extra spice to proceedings due to the Kildare connection. Two Mile House manager Niall Browne, who played a part in the win over Round Towers and managed to suffer a shoulder injury and also score a point, said after that game that he knew little about Courtwood at the time but would be doing plenty of homework in the build up to the game. “We analyse every team we’re playing against to the hilt as much as we can. We do a huge amount of research,” he said. “We had a guy looking at these guys the last day, we got videos of them and looked them up online – we’ll do the same thing again. We don’t really know anything about them because we’ve always said all year that we’ll just go one game at a time. “I’ve probably lost four or five finals thinking about who we’d be playing in two games time with this club, so we’re not falling into that trap again. We’ll do a huge amount of research on them. Generally, most teams will have two or three key men and we’ll try to shut them out.” It has been a long and gruelling year for Two Mile House, but they are not wanting it to finish just yet as they look to make it back to another Leinster final, five years after winning their only every provincial title at junior level.