‘You don’t win by playing nice’

Kerry’s hard edge. What might have been considered an oxymoron in the past has never been anything but fact as long as Darren Hughes has played senior football for Monaghan.

Even when Monaghan’s attempt to physically shake up Kerry almost succeeded in the 2007 All-Ireland quarter-final (a busted Paul Galvin walked off wounded after 53 minutes), Hughes, who came off the bench that day, recognised street smarts in the opposition.

Now, as he hears about Mayo being upset by some of Kerry’s behaviour in Castlebar last Saturday, he wonders what the fuss is all about.

Ronan Shanahan’s tackle on Evan Regan? “Unfortunate.” Regan was left concussed with a fractured jaw but Hughes comes to Shanahan’s defence.

“It was a loose hand. I don’t think he went to break his jaw. You’re gonna get that when you’re an inside forward — he’s not going to let you score a goal. I’ve only seen it once and it’s not for me to say whether it was meant (to hurt) or not but it looked like a loose arm. Evan Regan is not the tallest in the world. I don’t think any man goes out to purposely break a man’s jaw but it’s a contact sport and you’re going to have incidents like that.”

Hughes, though, believes the leading teams escape punishment because of tradition and misconceptions. “You don’t win by playing nice. You won’t come out of a tougher game this year than the Dubs. They have the dark arts down to a tee. Referees and people sort of get caught up in teams winning and playing nice football and think ‘oh, he wouldn’t do that’. But a lot of stuff goes on.”

Monaghan aren’t so lucky to have “a good name”, Hughes argues. The Scotstown man feels he himself has been the victim of being known as a physical player with a history of picking up cards. “I’ve got everything overturned that I appealed. Black cards, red cards. I’ve a clean slate.

“It’s very frustrating. I remember the first black card I got in 2014 against Seán Cavanagh, I know at the time that he had pulled me in and he hit the deck but how was I to argue it? He proved in the years after it that he is renowned for it. It was an Ulster championship game and we hadn’t beaten Tyrone in God knows how long and I’m at fault. It happens.

“You do what you have to do to win games but I’ve been up the road to Dublin a lot of times to overturn sanctions. I don’t blame referees. They get to see it once and from one angle and you see in other sports how they replay incidents and still can’t really call it.

“People like to label us for disciplinary reasons and sanctions but most of the time we get it overturned.

"It’s misconceptions like ‘oh, he’s done it before so he’ll probably do it again’. We take it on board and don’t really give it a toss at the minute but someday it’s going to affect us badly. We have lost men on the field and it’s frustrating then when you go and get it overturned with minimal ease.

“The bottom line is you bring an edge to your game and bring it to the line. But it’s up to each man then not to cross the line and let his team-mates down.”

Monaghan are up and running following last Sunday’s win in Kildare which Hughes felt both they and the opposition would have targeted for two points.

Conor McCarthy and Jack McCarron’s potential to aid and assist Conor McManus have plenty excited about the forward line.

“We always took it for granted that Conor would deliver on the big day but a lot of others were backing him up too. We needed to get more scorers though for Croke Park where we were falling short and we knew we had quality coming through.

“Conor (McCarthy) and Jack are there and there is David Garland and James Wilson who are going well in training and Micheál Bannigan too. Darren Freeman came in last year and we still have Gavin Doogan and Shane Carey. It’s all adding to the scoring part of our game.

“Some days Conor (McManus) may go out and kick 10 points and we lose. Some days he will go out and kick two and we win. Some days he hasn’t been as prolific yet put more in for the team with his all-round game. We know how good he is and it was backing up what he was doing because what we all were doing wasn’t enough at times so something had to change.

“People are moving away from what they see as this so-called blanket defence. We would have been labelled with it at times but we were always trying to get as many men up the field when we got the ball. We weren’t getting the scores in the final third that we felt at times our work to get there deserved.”

Tomorrow’s venue, Inniskeen’s Grattan Park, might be familiar to a couple of Kerry players from 2011 when the Kingdom claimed a memorable victory.

It’s only one of two losses Monaghan have suffered there in six games since 2010.

“It’s a different atmosphere and the stand is almost on top of you and there are great facilities. In the past, we might have brought Tyrone there and their dressing room mightn’t have been up to scratch but that kind of thinking is gone now.”