Tender loving care is catalyst for this revival
THE first thing that Páraic Duffy told the Scotstown players when he entered their dressing room at the start of this year was to remind them they were a good team.
It seemed an odd thing for the GAA’s former director general, now a selector under Kieran Donnelly, to say and it was even odder that Darren Hughes and his teammates would take such comfort from his reaffirmation.
After all, this was a serial winning group who had just won a third Monaghan title in a row – their fourth in five years.
As ever, you are only as good as your last game and there was little good to be had from Paddy McBrearty and Kilcar dishing out a 10-point trouncing in last year’s Ulster quarter-final.
That allowed their critics to trace a line backwards and declare that Scotstown were a lucky team rather than a very good one. After all, their critics argued, they should not even have reached last year’s county final when they trailed Ballybay by eight points going into injury time, but somehow stung for 2-2.
It was an astonishing comeback – especially so given that it was achieved in the absence of Darren’s younger brother Kieran who had been forced out of the game with an injury – but in the aftermath of their implosion against Kilcar, it was painted as a freak.
‘Paraic was on the outside for long enough and he was hearing different things and maybe he wanted to dispel some of those myths,’ explains Hughes.
‘In our place, if you lose they don’t be long telling you how bad you were and you could even hear the knives being sharpened with 10 minutes to go against Coleraine in the Ulster semi-final the last day, so you have to be ready for it.
‘The first thing he did when he came in was reaffirm how good a team we were. He told us how we had deserved it, how we had won it on merit and how we had not got the credit for it outside of the club.
‘Everyone was quick to talk about our weaknesses but nobody talked about how we did not throw the towel in. Even though we had gone on and won the county nobody gave us any credit for it as if county titles are just won by chance.’
If anyone knows this to be true, it is Hughes who, in his 14th season, won his fifth county medal this summer.
On the face of it, that is quite the strike rate, but all of those medals have come in the past six years.
What went before has lent him a sense of perspective which is serving him and Scotstown well.
It has helped insulate this group from the club’s history as four-time winners of the Ulster championship.
That was the club’s golden era, reeling off three-in-a-row between 1978-80 and added another in 1989.
That brings its own expectations, chatter Hughes turns a deaf ear to. ‘Obviously we have to listen a lot in the club about the older generation who have had success in Ulster.
‘Sometimes going in they forget about the Monaghan championship because they have Ulster club on the brain.
‘I honestly don’t think it can weigh us down, we never saw them play. It was not as if Scotstown won a club championship 10 years ago and we had a few boys who were on the fringes of the panel. We are on a clean slate and I know the boys don’t feel the pressure, we don’t talk about it.
‘It does not mean anything to us, other than a bit of craic to be had in the street or in the shop, but it does not affect us.’
Rather than chase gold at the end of the rainbow, Hughes spent the bulk of his career hoping that Scotstown would catch a break.
‘The big challenge I had when I came in in 2005 was that the club had not won a senior championship in 12 years in Monaghan and it took another eight years before we did win one. That was the biggest thing.
‘Every year we were going in we were hoping to win a championship but we were not expecting to win one so there was no talk or pressure of Ulster club because we were just not at that level.
‘For a couple of years we were just surviving at the bottom of the senior championship and we were just happy to stay there. ‘I remember we had a gala for being 50 years senior in ’09 and the year before it took us until the last couple of games to actually stay up. ‘Now that was some pressure because they were already planning the gala for the following year and yet in the 49th year here we were really struggling.’ What changed, then? A golden generation emerged for starters, yielding county talent such as his brother Kieran, Shane Carey, Conor McCarthy and last, but most definitely not least, Rory Beggan who in maintaining the excellence which earned him an All-Star last month, has pulled the strings for his club this winter.
That carried over into an unexpected hammering of Clontibret to deliver a first county in 20 years in 2013, but the most significant turning point came 12 months later.
‘Before that day in ’13, all I ever said was that I wanted to win one Championship and I would be happy but then you get greedy. You get beaten by a point the following year and that really sickens you and that was a big turning point too, losing to Clontibret like that in that year’s semi-final.
‘We have done four-in-a-row since but that was still a sore day for us. I would say if we had won that second county in 2014 we would not be doing what we are doing now because it really hurt the players.’
They have other hurt to fall back on as well; coming within a kick of the ball of winning Ulster in 2015, but Crossmaglen triumphed in extratime.
They can now avenge that humiliation by Kilcar last year by setting the record straight against Donegal champions Gaoth Dobhair in Healy Park today. It is a prospect which teases Hughes, whose career highlight also happened to be against Donegal.
‘The best day I ever had on a football pitch was in the 2013 Ulster final against Donegal and that has still to be matched so we will see what Sunday brings but it might be a different story on Monday morning.’