HEADING off into the sun of Dubai on the Opel GAA/GPA Football Allstars tour, Conor McManus is hopeful that it won’t set on any more of his Monaghan colleagues.
The 2015 Allstar lamented the recent retirements of Dick Clerkin and Paul Finlay but believes that his Clontibret club-mates Dessie Mone and Vinny Corey, and Stephen Gollogly of Carrickmacross will stay on for 2017.
“I’d be hopeful that that would be the end of it,” said McManus. “We’ve a couple of older players that have been involved this year that aren’t back in with Monaghan yet – the likes of Vinny and Dessie and Stephen Gollogly and a few boys like that, but you’d be hopeful that those boys will all be there next year.”
Clerkin and Finlay have hung up their Monaghan jerseys after 17 and 14 Championship campaigns respectively, and McManus accepts their loss will be felt even though their minutes on the pitch were limited this year:
“Lookit, when you lose two players of the calibre of Paul Finlay and Dick Clerkin, given the service that they’ve given to Monaghan and the experience that them pair of boys had over 15, 16, 17, 18 years, whatever it was between the two of them, there’s no doubt that they’ll be a loss in the dressing room.
“They weren’t maybe starting or having the same impact on the field as they would have had over the years but to not have them in the dressing room and as leaders, with young players coming in looking up to them, it’s certainly a blow.”
Having said that, McManus is confident that Monaghan can bounce back after a disappointing Championship, when they lost to Donegal in an Ulster semi-final replay then at home to Longford in the subsequent qualifier:
“Monaghan football’s in a good place at the minute. We’d be hoping that a number of the young fellas would come in and step up to the plate.
“There’s a lot of them boys have got game time, particularly in the Championship. We had a lot of young lads that played U21s and things like that. They have a year’s experience under their belt now and we’ll all have to stand on our own two feet now. You can’t be relying on older players.
“There’s maybe a sense of comfort in them being there but that’s gone now. It’s sink or swim for the players now but I have no doubt that we have young players there that will step up.”
McManus insisted he wasn’t worried that manager Malachy O’Rourke might me the first man to depart the Oriel county set-up after four seasons in charge in the wake of that Longford loss:
“Well, I don’t think he was ever going to, but I suppose after a day like that – not just for Malachy but for everybody – you’re questioning things.
“You’re thinking ‘Jesus, the amount of time and effort we’ve put into this, and we turn out a performance like that.’ That was probably the most disappointing thing, and it takes a couple of weeks to get over that initial disappointment.
“And then, when you sit and look at it in the cold light of day, you realise there’s things we can do better and improvements we can make.
“I suppose if Malachy didn’t feel that was the case, maybe he wouldn’t have stayed on. But I don’t think it was ever a case that Malachy was going to walk away. Like everybody else, he probably just needed time to gather his thoughts and clear his head.”
Fermanagh native O’Rourke has led Monaghan to two Ulster titles under his tenure but they are yet to reach an All-Ireland semi-final.
If the proposals put forward by GAA Director-General – and Monaghan man – Paraic Duffy for group stages to replace the All-Ireland quarter-finals are implemented, McManus is cautiously optimistic that his county might make that breakthrough if they can reach the last eight again next season:
“The only thing is it gets you more games, and at that stage of the summer players want to be playing football.
“People are arguing that it aids the stronger teams, but if you’re getting three games up there [at the last eight stage] and you don’t progress, well you only really have yourself to blame. It’s something that could work well, and games at that stage of the year is what everybody wants.”
Overall, despite retaining Division One status in the National Football League, McManus would rate 2016 as a ‘must do much better’ season, recalling: “Well it started okay, the results were decent but the performances probably weren’t great and when you’re in the League at that early stage you’re thinking, ‘Well, just get points on the board and hopefully the performances will come.
“Our first two games we won them [against Roscommon and Down] and then we lost the next two [against eventual All-Ireland finalists Dublin and Mayo] although we played quite well in those two games but didn’t get the points on the board so it was a sort of reversal from the first two games.
“Overall, we probably wouldn’t be that happy with the year in terms of the performances.
“We never really got going as well as we had in the previous year, even though we still probably could have ended up in an Ulster final as easily as not. It’s fine margins but we’ve a lot of improvements to make.”
Although there may be more younger heads and fewer older heads, the important thing is to have cool heads, a lack of which led to their ultimate Championship exit this year, he feels:
“Maybe we panicked a wee bit [against Longford], in that we had so much possession in the last 10 or 15 minutes of that game but actually never made it count.
“So it’s something we’ll have to learn from, and probably at some stage next year we will look at that and try and improve from it. But now is not the time for that. You just have to get your head down and get working in these months and get ready for January.”
After enjoying the Dubai sun, of course…
