‘We have to get our own house in order’
WHEN Neil McManus set off on a round-the-world trip with his fiancée, he never imagined he’d end up watching the Christy Ring Cup final in Vietnam. The drama of the scoreboard being wrong, Meath lifting the Cup, and then Antrim missing out again at the second time of asking. ‘In a little shack, maybe a tent for the second one,’ he answers as to where he tuned in via GAA GO. ‘Just watching it on my fiancée’s iPad. She said it was one of the worst bits of the trip because I didn’t speak for three days after it. ‘We had actually twigged it ourselves that the scoreboard was wrong. We were thinking “What’s going on here?” Just thought it would be rectified. Then it wasn’t. (I was) just following social media then to see what the outcome was going to be. It wasn’t an enjoyable couple of days, definitely not.’ The rest of the trip? A blast. Something that fulfilled a long-time ambition after dedicating himself to the cause for so long. ‘You commit to something and you go with it. Every minute of every year that I’ve been with Antrim, 11-odd years, I’ve given everything I had to it.’ Now it’s about lifting Antrim from Division 2A of the League and back into the Liam MacCarthy Cup if the Christy Ring Cup can be won this time. A 6-27 to 0-19 Walsh Cup defeat by Kilkenny in January showed the ground that has to be made up. ‘There’s no comparison at the minute between where Antrim are at and where Kilkenny are at. We have to be realistic. We’re in Division 2A, hurling in the Christy Ring, and we have to go back to the start. Put the building blocks, the foundations back in place, of honest, hard work. If you get those two things right, the hurling performances will follow. ‘We probably owe a lot to Sambo [Terence McNaughton], Dominic McKinley and Gary O’Kane who have come in and taken over the reins management wise. We put in a very tough preseason. It was about honesty, hard work, bringing the core values Antrim were always known for. ‘I think we have to get our own house in order. The onus is on us. We have to get it right, we have to work hard at it, figure these things out for ourselves.’