Colin Walshe: ‘A great team will retain an Ulster championship’

They have ambitions beyond the provincial boundary, but Colin Walshe says Monaghan want to reinforce their superiority in Ulster by mounting a successful defence of their title.

In the past three seasons under Malachy O’Rourke, their dominance of the Ulster SFC was unmatched with three successive finals gleaning two titles in 2013 and 2015.

In one sense, they have nothing left to prove up north. Croke Park and the All-Ireland quarter-finals, where they have faltered three years running, should be the next step forward now. But they can still break new ground by holding onto the Anglo Celt, a mission which begins at Clones today against Down.

“A good team will win an Ulster championship – but a great team will retain an Ulster championship,” Walshe said.

“After winning for the first time in 2013, we went into 2014 and sat out our marker that we wanted to win Ulster again. We beat Tyrone and Armagh but in the final Donegal were the better team on the day.

“As disappointing as that was, we’ve now got another opportunity to retain it.

“Losing to Tyrone in the All-Ireland quarter-final last year really left a sour taste in the mouth so every man is looking forward to trying to do something we didn’t do before, and that’s retain our title.”

Monaghan have demonstrated impressive consistency under O’Rourke, the only blip at provincial level coming against Donegal in the 2014 Ulster final.

However their lack of success in the All-Ireland series grates with a group of players desperate to bridge the gap between provincial and national success.

Their only championship win in Croke Park was an extra-time thriller against Kildare in the 2014 All-Ireland qualifiers.

They’ve lost out to Tyrone in the quarter-finals in 2013 and 2015, as well as Dublin in 2014, when Walshe suffered a cruciate knee ligament injury.

“We know where we’d like to go and we know where we fell down over the last couple of years,” admitted the All Star defender.

“I suppose there is one way of playing football in Ulster and it sometimes can be low-scoring because of how teams set up, and you can see the scoring averages in Croke Park are higher.

“But we’re only concentrating on Down, because if you get caught there’s a long road back. That’s the way we have to approach it. But we do know where we want to go.”

Down are being dismissed as no-hopers after a terrible year.

They’ve won just one of their last 13 matches – and that was only a McKenna Cup game against St Mary’s – but Monaghan are too experienced to slip into relax mode.

“We can handle the favourites tag a bit better than maybe in years gone by,” says Walshe.

“There are a lot players that have played a lot of football and won a lot of championship matches – and the spine of the team hasn’t changed, so a lot of the team knows what it’s about.

“We were in the position ourselves a few years back where we would always have looked to knock the champions off their pedestal.

“Down will be no different. They’ll fancy that they’d love to be the team that knocks us out of the Ulster championship so we won’t be fooled by them being relegated. We know they’ve got some good players.”