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Ulster SFC is about to hot up - Monaghan's Darren Hughes

Monaghan ran out convincing winners over Down after a slow start at Clones last Sunday <br />Picture by Seamus Loughran
Monaghan ran out convincing winners over Down after a slow start at Clones last Sunday
Picture by Seamus Loughran
Monaghan ran out convincing winners over Down after a slow start at Clones last Sunday
Picture by Seamus Loughran

Ulster Senior Football Championship

THE Ulster Championship has been the slowest of slow burners so far - but all that is about to change, according to Monaghan midfielder Darren Hughes.

Scotstown ace Hughes was part of the Farney side who, after a tight first-half, swatted aside the challenge of a beleaguered Down outfit at Clones last Sunday, winning by an embarrassingly easy 19 points.

Of the four games played in this year’s Ulster Championship, Antrim’s six-point reversal against Fermanagh in the preliminary round remains the closest encounter, with Tyrone cruising past Derry (11 points) and Cavan brushing aside Armagh with eight to spare before Monaghan’s second-half stroll. But Hughes believes the race for the Anglo-Celt is about to hot up, starting with this Sunday’s last quarter-final clash between Donegal and Pete McGrath’s Erne men.

He said: “I think, when you look at it now, the five teams left in the Ulster Championship are probably the best five teams in Ulster, so the next day you go out’s going to be a different task.

“To be honest, I don’t think there’s much between any of the teams left in it. They’ve proved over the National League and in the Championship that they’re all at their best, so we’ve two good semi-finals and a good game next week to look forward to. I think, from next week on, things will start to spice up a bit.”

Monaghan went into Sunday’s game as huge favourites to progress and Hughes admits the reigning Ulster champions simply had to stay focused on the job at hand - going out and proving they were the superior team.

“We talked about that during the week,” he said.

“We knew we were the better team but, unless you come out and perform, you’re not going to win, so it was about our performance at the end of the day - no matter who we were playing. We knew we just had to perform, we were the better team and it showed in the second-half.”

Malachy O’Rourke’s men did plenty of soul-searching en route to their second Ulster success in three years last July and Hughes feels they still have plenty of improving to do if they are to stand any chance of winning back-to-back titles.

A week-long training camp in Portugal at the end of April helped bring them on, but the Farney men are well aware of the task in front of them. Hughes added: “Boys went to Portugal 10-years-ago and were beat in the first round of the Championship.

“The Portugal thing’s no big issue - it’s great to get it, it’s worth three weeks training to you what you get done. From what we got done in Portugal, in the following month we probably had the same amount of sessions, with club championship and different things.

“Things were very fragmented for a couple of weeks after we came back from Portugal, probably only two collective sessions, but it’s something that, last year, benefitted us.

“We feel we won Ulster title last year without being great in any sense. We were probably lucky to pull away from Cavan in the last 20 minutes, pulled away from Fermanagh in the last 10 minutes and never scored for 22 minutes against Donegal in the final.

“You’ll take the medal at the end of the day, but we know our flaws; in each game, there were serious flaws highlighted. We’ve spent a lot of time since December/January getting them ironed out.”