EVERYONE in Corrigan Park was counting down the seconds until Neil McManus was moved from his midfield position to full-forward during last Sunday’s make-or-break Division 1B encounter with Laois.
There was concrete theory behind what the Antrim management team were thinking. After all, they knew more about the strengths and weaknesses of Laois than anyone else in Corrigan last week.
But, often a gap emerges between theory and practice. Liam O’Connell’s perceived lack of pace on the edge of the square for Laois couldn’t be exploited by the fleet-footed James McNaughton, especially on heavy sod.
With the visitors shooting the lights out at the other end of the field, Darren Gleeson responded by pushing McManus up and pulling McNaughton back.
The tactical shift was the winning of the game and is the primary reason why Antrim will be playing top flight hurling for a fourth consecutive year.
The gargantuan displays of Nigel Elliott and Michael Bradley also helped Antrim’s effort no end.
In first-half stoppage-time, Gerard Walsh sent one of his trademark long, diagonal passes on top of McManus and O’Connell. The sliotar hit the palm of McManus’s hand, and as it invariably does, stayed there.
O’Connell knew he was beaten. McManus looked up and hammered the sliotar into the bottom corner of the net. The game changed in that instant.
Neil McManus is one of the greatest hurlers to come out of Antrim. Of any era. He is one of the greatest hurlers of his generation. In any county.
For my sins, I’ve been covering Antrim hurling for over two decades. It’s only right that Antrim GAA got its house in order so that servants like McManus could enjoy the latter stages of their careers at the highest level.
People like Dinny Cahill, Jim McKernan, Terence McNaughton, Dominic McKinley and Kevin Ryan always seemed to be fighting a rising tide.
Antrim were light years behind hurling’s illustrious lights.
So, from that grim historical perspective, the roughness of the road has smoothed considerably. It started under the canny leadership of the umbrella group Saffron Vision, and people like Collie Donnelly and Terry Reilly who made a decisive break with the past.
That good work continues today from county board level to the Saffron Business Forum to the clubs to resident S&C expert Brendan Murphy and his team to Darren Gleeson and his management team to the players themselves.
There used to be a yawning gap between Antrim and the likes of Kilkenny and Waterford. Now it’s single digits.
When you think about it, that’s a crazy, collective effort because it doesn’t seem that long ago newspaper journalists were writing the same old cut-and-paste match reports of terrible, merciless beatings in Wexford Park and Nowlan Park – and even getting relegated by Kerry.
Throughout the last decade-and-a-half, Neil McManus has been the one constant, the one beating heart in the saffron jersey who could generate some light through his defiant displays.
He was the one who provided the crumbs of comfort to the few dozen hard-bitten supporters who travelled the length and breadth of the country to watch the team, and who made their journey home just a few miles shorter.
McManus was Antrim's life-support machine on the hurling field. At number eight, or 12, or 14.
One of the best things about the Cushendall native is that he is manufactured – manufactured in the most complimentary sense.
He wasn’t like Shane McNaughton or Paul Shiels – two men who often turned their hurl into a wand in the tightest of spaces.
He wasn’t blessed with great pace either – but what he always had was a warrior’s heart, a brilliant hand, technical excellence and a kind of bullet-proof belief in himself.
As his Cushendall club-mate and under-age mentor Terence McNaughton once said: “Neil has made himself better than his ability allows him, if that makes sense.”
Very few of us in life actually fulfil our potential. Neil McManus comes as close as anything I can see or recall.
From his minor days with Antrim in 2005/06, his leadership skills were easily detected.
Good and bad days, McManus always turned up. Trench warfare has always been his trade.
The scoreboard may beg to differ, but McManus never really left a hurling field defeated.
Anyone who’s followed the Antrim senior hurling team over the years will have lost count of how many times he’s produced game-winning moments, made a hook or a block that stemmed the tide, inspired those around him to dig deeper within themselves.
Approaching two decades, McManus has been the epitome of defiance while his insatiable pursuit of excellence remains undimmed.
Away from hurling, he has an acute sense of place and taken on leadership roles within his community through spreading awareness of the important and lifesaving work of the local RLNI Lifeboats Association and getting involved with local community group, Grow the Glens, which is in the throes of transforming the old police station in his home village into an employment hub.
At 35, McManus has plenty of road in front of him. Last Sunday was proof of that.
In an interview with The Irish News in 2019, McManus had no regrets over not playing on the greatest stage - an All-Ireland final.
“Not a second of time spent in the gym or on the pitch or in Casement Park on a Friday afternoon after work practising frees for an hour, not a bit of it was wasted," he said.
“It is the best time I’ve ever spent in my life. That’s the truth. How lucky are you to find your absolute passion and get to follow it for as long?
“As a minor I fully believed we’d be playing in big All-Ireland games. I totally believed it. We were competing with every team in the country at minor level. Looking back, I’ve loads of regrets, obviously, but spending so much time playing hurling is not one of them.”
When he does eventually retire, he’ll be an unfathomable loss to his county and to hurling itself.
For now, though, we should savour these days for as long as they last.
