McEnaney: Ulster decider is our ‘now or never’ moment

SEAMUS McENANEY has seen enough to know that Sunday is a ‘now or never’ moment for Monaghan.

By his own reckoning, ‘Banty’ hasn’t missed a championship match involving his county since 1982 and it is a tale taken from those glory days in the ‘80s that the current Monaghan manager that sums up why.

“I remember the time Gene Sherry lifted the National League trophy in Croke Park in 1985. He was only a young man at the time, just 23 or 24. He told a story about how before he lifted the trophy he was thinking ‘this isn’t so bad, I’ll be back up here three or four times in the next ten years’. He never got back up them steps. People can go through a career, a lifetime and never get up them steps. Those occasions are very few and far between.”

A second chance at climbing up the Hogan Stand passed them by 12 months later when Laois finished two points the better side in the league decider but Ulster titles in 1985 and 1988 were ample consolation for that disappointment.

McEnaney remembers the second of those Anglo-Celt successes “like it were yesterday” and how Tyrone goalkeeper Aidan Skelton fumbled a ball to, of all people, Nudie Hughes who punished him to the hilt with a goal that would prove the winning and losing of the game.

Nineteen years have passed by since and Monaghan have failed to reach an Ulster decider in the intervening time. Failed to beat Tyrone again too, whether at senior, minor or the U21 grade. Sunday has the potential to end more than one barren run.

“Monaghan people would have always supported Armagh, Tyrone and Derry. You could say we are fed up supporting everyone else in Ulster. The bottom line is that we have played Tyrone in U21 finals, minor finals and the 2005 championship and we have come out second best on every occasion. A lot of the players in this Monaghan dressing room have been beaten by Tyrone three or four times in the last seven or so years. Tyrone are the form team. They have talent coming through this last few years at minor and U21. That’s hard to compete with.

“This team has faced up to a lot of challenges this year. A lot of Monaghan teams have been living in the shadow of the teams of the ‘80s. This team had gone 22 or 23 years without beating Down in Newry, something similar with Derry. The challenges seem to be creeping up and there is no getting away from the difficulty of this one.”

McEnaney has been preparing feverishly for this very day. The first breath he took as Monaghan manager three years ago was used to declare his ambition to win an Ulster title.

His first two years showed progress in the league and qualifiers but it took until this campaign for them to win a game in the Ulster Championship — their first since the shock defeat of Armagh in 2003. Something extra had been required.

McEnaney shuffled his management deck in the off-season, dispensing with the services of Gerry McCarville, Bernie Murray and Gerry Hoey and replacing them with Adrian Trappe and Martin McElkennon as trainer.

In January, the panel moved into the county’s new dedicated training facility at Cloghan just outside Castleblaney, bringing an end to the travelling circus that had been their training sessions.

“I felt that everything had to move to a new level. The county board has produced the new training grounds and this is home for us now. I know it takes me 23 minutes from the house to get here or whatever. The players have bought into the whole scenario. There is a serious competitive edge in training. Our training sessions were normally tougher than our games on Sunday.”

They ended the league group stages with seven wins from seven and a plus-39 points difference that far outstripped any other team in the country but a second Division Two title in three years disappeared with a disastrous start to the semi-final against Meath in Croke Park where they leaked two goals.

McEnaney was far from worried.

“After we beat Offaly and got promoted we took our eye slightly off the ball for the remainder of the league. Another Division Two title was never going to satisfy me or the players or the people of Monaghan. We got a lot of criticism for the way we played against Meath and we never like playing badly at Croke Park but who cares now?”