Malachy O’Rourke hails stylish Conor McManus performance

Malachy O’Rourke has no doubt but that Conor McManus is among Gaelic football’s most lethal marksman and no-one who saw the Clontibret attacker perform in Cavan yesterday would be of a mind to disagree.

Simple stats have never done the 27-year old justice.

Not for him the easy pickings available in the other three provinces in high summer. No, for McManus it has always been about mining assiduously for the odd gem, and he produced two here despite the usual close attentions.

The first, after 17 minutes which he kicked while on the run, was delicious. So was the other, dinked over from the sideline under duress as the game approached its end and with the sides level. This is a man with a claim right now to the nation’s best.

“He’s not far away from it, anyway,” said O’Rourke. “Again, we knew that Conor was going to be double-teamed and so on. A lot of the time, if you are kicking high ball or 50-50 ball in, it’s very easy to knock it away from him. Whereas I thought, in the second half, we were popping the ball in front of him.

“He was able to win it easier and then take his man on. The last score he got was top class. We expect that off him, but we are trying to take the load off him, that he is not winning every match for us. There will be days he will be under pressure but there’s no doubt, it’s great to have him up there.”

How Cavan would love a McManus. For all their underage graduates this last few years, they lack a forward of his class and, crucially given the torment that Ulster can be, the experience to know that patience is possibly the greatest virtue of them all.

“Well, that’s it,” said McManus. “Sometimes you have to wait on things to open up later on. We’re just happy to be in the semi-final.”

For Cavan, there is little in the way of consolation, though manager Terry Hyland tried to summon some joy from the fact his team had done lots of things right in a game that went wrong in that last 15 minutes.

“There is loads of ability in our team. It is only a matter of getting the boys outside the group to believe in them. Sometimes they get knocked a little back because people pigeon-hole them. The lads fought for everything today. If it had ended up a draw, I don’t think there would have been a row from anybody.” As for where it went wrong, he was fairly specific.

“Probably somewhere around the middle of the second half, we lost it a bit around the middle of the field. Maybe we backed off a bit and allowed them to get scores from outside the zone. The wind was probably a factor as well. It was a help to us in the first half. There was a very strong breeze out there. People in the stand mightn’t have realised how strong it was. That allowed them to shoot from quite a distance. But we came back rightly in the end. It was only a one-point game.”