Clerkin says provincial finals not losing lustre in North

ONE OF the stock claims each passing summer is that the provincial championships don’t matter as much any more.

Sligo exposed that as the lie it is last Sunday, but Dick Clerkin didn’t need events in Dr Hyde Park to confirm what he already knew.

A member of the Monaghan panel since Jack McCarville blooded him as a minor back in 1999, the Currin midfielder had never been part of a team to win a game in the Ulster Championship until the county’s defeat of Down in Newry last month.

Yes, times have been that tough for Monaghan in recent years, but Clerkin’s misfortune has been to find himself on the sidelines on the rare days that the sun shone through the clouds.

His days as a starter were still some way down the road when Fermanagh were accounted for at the turn of the millennium, and he found himself out of favour with Colm Coyle when they shocked Armagh in 2003.

“People say that the provincial championships are losing their lustre but that’s definitely not the case up north,” he says. “This is still foremost in every county’s minds, especially us. This was our goal at the start of the year.

“A lot of people would say that it isn’t just a cliché about having to suffer a few defeats to learn what it takes to win and we’ve had our fair share of losses down the years. We came into the year with a lot of hurdles to jump in that respect.”

Himself more than most. A chemical engineer with Irish Cement, Clerkin was informed late last year that his contract would take him to a remote Finish town on the Russian border called Lappeenrantra for the first six months of the year.

Stepping off the panel for the season was never an option, so he negotiated his stay down to just over three months and managed to get home for four league matches.

Finland was testing. Temperatures dipped down to 30 below zero at times and he found himself pushing endless weights in a gym knowing all the time that the rest of the panel was on an almost vertical curve of improvement back home.

The journey home was torturous. Lappeenrantra to Helsinki alone took three hours, after which he still faced two flights and another spin by car before he reached his own front door in Monaghan.

“Football has been in the family since I was a cub,” says Clerkin whose father Hugo also played midfield for the county.

“People were saying that Monaghan might go well this year but that wasn’t even it so much. It’s part of your life.

“You get an awful lot out of it. There will always be the glory days but it just came down to the fact that I couldn’t bear being out there knowing the boys were playing. There was no job worth missing out on this.”

When he got back, injuries to others opened the door to let him build up his match fitness against Offaly and Meath and though the latter inflicted their first NFL defeat on Monaghan, in the semi-final, it hardly made them blink.

Down and Derry were considered to be the blue bloods when Monaghan faced them in Ulster this year but both were dispatched with some style to give Monaghan their first pair of Ulster Championship victories in one season since their last provincial title back in 1988. The Derry win may have delivered them to Sunday’s final but the earlier accounting for Down was arguably more important.

“It was a level playing field going up to Newry as regards who was favourites or not and a few of the boys hadn’t played championship football before. We had done well in the league but championship is a different ball game.

“We had fallen short in the white heat and hard grounds before but we felt going into it that our preparation was better than it had been for years and the win took the pressure off the whole camp.”

A different kind of weight is on their shoulders this week. It’s 19 years since Monaghan last claimed an Ulster title or even participated in the final. Much of the county is at fever pitch and Clerkin admits it will be the throw-in tomorrow before they know for sure how they’ve handled it.

Successful Monaghan dressing rooms aren’t completely alien to him. When his dad Hugo won provincial and league medals under Sean McCague in the late 70s and mid-80s, Clerkin can recall his cheeks being pinched by men like Nudie Hughes, Gene Sherry and Ciaran Murray on match days and at training sessions.

Clerkin Jnr may still be looking for an Ulster medal of his own but he does at least have a league medal to sit alongside his dad’s, after the Division Two final defeat of Meath two years ago. Croke Park experienced a pitch invasion that day the likes of which had never been seen outside September, when Paul Finlay’s injury-time free led to a bizarre goal that sealed the title. Clerkin pinpoints that as the starting point for the progress since.

“It took us a while to put the whole thing in context afterwards but it did give the county a bit of a profile that it had been lacking for a few years. We had beaten a Meath team in Croke Park so you have to be happy with that. It’s all part and parcel of developing a team. I guess we’ll see how far we’ve come against Tyrone.”