All-Ireland Qualifying round 4B: Down v Monaghan (Saturday, Croke Park, 5pm, live on Sky Sports Main Event)
DING ding, round two. Thirty-five days after the mighty men from the Mournes rolled into Armagh and registered a strong seven on the Ulster Championship Richter scale, Down and Monaghan go toe-to-toe once more this evening.
Croke Park, rather than the Athletic Grounds, is the stage for the latest instalment of what is already one of the summer’s most intriguing sagas.
Anybody who was in Armagh for the first game will have needed a few hours to get it out of their system as a wall of disbelief and unrestrained delight greeted the Down players at the final whistle.
It was an understandable outpouring after two years of hurt - the pressure valve first released against the Orchard in Newry turned into giddy day-dreams of Ulster glory once the Farney had been spectacularly cast aside.
Tyrone brought a swift end to any delusions of grandeur as the Mournemen, beaten but not battered, were nonetheless brought back to earth with a bump at Clones.
Monaghan, meanwhile, licked their wounds and went through the back door, though wins over Division Four outfits Wexford and Carlow give little indication of the extent to which they have moved on from their Ulster semi-final shock.
Questions surround Down too. How Eamonn Burns’s young, relatively inexperienced side rebuild after that Ulster final setback will be telling.
But there were some crumbs of comfort, even in defeat.
Trailing by 11 with 10 minutes left, the ghosts of their 19-point mauling by Monaghan a year previous loomed ominously as the relentless Red Hands refused to let up.
That Down continued to fight and reduced the gap to eight by the close of play gives some indication that this group is made of stronger stuff than in more recent campaigns.
Indeed, even against Armagh and then Monaghan, they weathered potentially deadly storms at different stages before restoring calm and sailing across the line.
However, coming up against an opponent you have already beaten once presents a more complicated set of circumstances.
Kevin McKernan and Peter Turley are the only starting survivors from 2013 when Down toppled Derry in Ulster before the Oak Leafs caught them in the long grass of the Qualifiers.
It is a tricky one to negotiate for management and players.
The Mournemen put so much into the first game against Monaghan, and replicating the intensity of that performance will be extremely difficult.
Then, Down had the motivation of what happened in Clones 12 months earlier. That was a wrong they felt they needed to right – box ticked.
They were also written off across the board as cannon-fodder ahead of a Monaghan-Tyrone Ulster final. They proved those doubters wrong – another box ticked.
The odds of Down repeating that success are not wildly different from the first game – they are 3/1 now instead of 4/1 – but any preview or prediction carries the caveat of ‘well, they did it before…’
Monaghan’s motivation will be entirely different this time around too.
They know for sure that they are not facing the team they beat by 19 points in 2016.
Also, the TV highlight reel pinpointed Down’s appetite for destruction as they smashed into tackles and produced a physical edge few thought they possessed. The Mournemen won every 50-50 ball at midfield and effectively stopped the Farney punching holes through the middle.
For a team of Monaghan’s standing and physical prowess, being cowed in such fashion will not have sat well, and there will have been no more delighted group of men anywhere in Ireland than when they were paired with Down again.
Malachy O’Rourke will have studied the first encounter in detail to see where Monaghan went wrong. He opted to start without the influential Gavin Doogan that night, and it was a decision that backfired in spectacular fashion.
The Magheracloone man is one of the Farney dogs of war, his hard tackling and strong ball-carrying skills an integral part of so many of their better performances during an impressive National League campaign.
Without him, Down were able to cut through Monaghan time and again using the pace of Caolan Mooney, Shay Millar and the Johnston brothers, Ryan and Jerome, to maximum effect.
Up top, Connaire Harrison emerged a handsome winner in his one-on-one tussle with the normally touch-tight Drew Wylie, taking the Ballybay man for three points while also bringing the red and black arrows into play all evening.
The Glasdrumman forward is unlikely to get so much easy ball today, and how Down work around that potential problem will be key. If it gets congested, as it did against Tyrone, their long-range shooting will need to be on point.
Monaghan, meanwhile, will have learnt from their mistakes. When they ran into a blockade around the middle against Cavan in their Ulster Championship opener, they worked it wide and built from there.
And when the Farney eventually adopted that tactic in the final 20 minutes of the first Down game, it paid dividends as they chipped away at their deficit.
In the wide open spaces of Croke Park, Eamonn Burns can expect more of the same from Malachy O’Rourke’s men.
At the Athletic Grounds, so many of the Down players turned in career-best performances at this level. They stopped Monaghan getting into any kind of rhythm until late on, yet it can’t be overlooked that over half of the Farneymen failed to fire.
It is surely inconceivable that Monaghan will be so off-key a second time, especially with the added incentive of revenge against a rival.
Down could surprise us all again, and perhaps then they would get the credit and recognition they feel they deserve. But it is hard to shift the feeling that while the Mournemen won the battle, it is Monaghan who will win the war.
