McManus rues defeats but do not dare write off Monaghan
‘A SECOND REFEREE WOULD FIX A LOT OF WHAT IS WRONG’
CONOR McMANUS has been listening to it for the bones of his 12 years spent living and playing in a Monaghan jersey.
While others just exit the Championship, when Monaghan get beaten they fall through a trapdoor into football oblivion.
Every year is their last in the top tier. They are the perennial favourites to drop out of the Allianz League’s top division, yet this spring they can look forward to a fifth-successive season in Division one, which only the big three of Dublin, Mayo and Kerry can better.
They are admired for their resolve and consistency in the summer – they have made it to the Championship’s last eight in five of the last six years.
Under Malachy O’Rourke they have the second highest win-rate in League and Championship football since his appointment in 2013, with inevitably only Dublin posting better figures.
That puts them at the front of the game’s chasing pack, and yet when they came up one-point shy against Tyrone last August in the All-Ireland semi-final, the narrative was that they had blown their one shot at reaching what would have been a second All-Ireland final in their history.
Meanwhile, Mayo and Kerry did not reach that far into the summer and yet their underwhelming campaigns were interpreted as blips they will bounce back from, but the prognosis for McManus and his team is not as positive.
Perhaps it is their lack of size – their population of just over 60,000 is the smallest in the game’s top tier by a distance – or lack of tradition, but whatever reason people to choose to write them off, McManus has stopped listening to them.
‘We have been listening to that for the past 10 years,’ explains McManus, who after winning his third award this year is travelling with the PwC’s GAA GPA All-Stars tour in Philadelphia this week.
‘Monaghan were finished when Banty left and we are still standing.
‘As a group and as a team we feel we can improve and if we do that we will be there or thereabouts.
‘The thing about it is every other team in the country will be trying to do the same. There is no guarantees in any shape or form. Everybody is telling you when you are talking to them that we’ve got to take the next step and get to the All-Ireland final. If it was only as simple as that we would have done it long ago.’
Still, it is hard not to feel that this year represented a missed opportunity.
They avoided the juggernaut that was Dublin by finishing top of their Super 8s group and they had enough of the game to see off a Tyrone team they had already emphatically beaten in League and Championship earlier in the season. ‘I would look back with regrets no doubt about that,’ he admits. ‘The two things that stick out for me is that we did not make it to the Ulster final or to the All-Ireland final. ‘That’s ultimately what you see when you look back on the year. We had chances to be in both finals but we were in neither of them.’ They were suckerpunched by a late Fermanagh goal in Ulster, but their failure to get past Tyrone was in a large part to how McManus’s scoring threat was nullified. Earlier in the year, he kicked the score of the Championship in a sublime display which saw Monaghan comfortably over the line in Healy Park, and when Kerry had the audacity to go man on man with him, he took them for 1-4 in open play.
In the semi-final, though, he was double-tagged and on top of the close marking, he failed to catch a break from referee Anthony Nolan (below) when he appeared to be fouled on more than one occasion.
Little wonder he takes a jaundiced view of the proposed raft of experimental rule changes set to be introduced in the New Year, arguing that one obvious rule change would make for a far better game.
‘At this stage, I don’t even know what’s what. All you hear is rules this, rules that and you don’t know what’s in or what’s out. To be honest, I don’t see a whole need for a pile of change.
‘A second referee, though, would fix a lot of what is wrong in the game. What we are doing now is just firing more and more at them and asking too many questions of them. Referees are struggling at the minute and that is not a slight against referees in any shape or form.
‘There is so much happening in these big games and they are asked to keep an eye on things on and off the ball. We have black cards, yellow cards, red cards and we are talking now about sin bins, counting steps, counting handpasses.
‘You don’t want to sound like you are complaining because it is a man’s game and you want to go out and play. You fight your corner and you continue to do that.’
He will fight this year from a home base. His days of travelling from Dublin to training over as a result of taking on an auctioneering business in Monaghan town.
It is a daunting new challenge, only dwarfed by the one he will face on the pitch as Dublin set out to make history.
‘There is much being made on the drive for five but at the moment they are massive favourites to go and do it and it is up to the rest of the chasing pack to see if it can be done. It is a big ask,’ McManus said.
As ever, though, he and Monaghan will not shirk from trying to find the answer.