THE LITTLE THINGS tell a lot.
13 December 2022 and Conor McManus finds himself in his car, punching the clock on his never-ending list of GAA commitments. The rain would love the peace to come down in sheets, but the wind is flinging it at right angles into everyone’s face.
The gauge on his dash tells him it is sub-zero temperatures. Another year begins. His 17th consecutive season for the Monaghan footballers.
Only, instead of driving the four miles to Monaghan’s training base in Cloghan for some good old-fashioned muck and gutters pre-season punishment, McManus points the car in the direction of the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown, 40 miles north.
There, he will pose for the publicity pictures for the Ulster Council and hold grown up conversations with assembled journalists at the launch of the Dr McKenna Cup.
He might help himself to a cup of tea and the staple fare of chicken goujons and sandwiches cut up into delightful, Women’s Institute-Standard triangles.
It is December after all. He’s paid his dues. His 35th birthday was only the week before, thanks for asking but when a footballer gets to this stage, they get the Old Maid vibes.
What he’s not doing, is following the heels of some eager young colt looking to catch the eye in the 200 metre runs. Or trapped in a tackling grid with a gnarly veteran type who respects him too much to go easy and keep the elbows down.
It’s clear that the new Monaghan manager, Vinny Corey, would dearly love to swaddle him in cosy blankets only unleashing him at the appropriate times. So it’s a philosophical McManus that evening in the ballroom, facing down the Dictaphones.
“When you get to this stage of your career and this age, the thought comes over your mind as to how much longer this can happen,” he explains.
“But I never actually said to myself that I wasn’t coming back to Monaghan. I didn’t at all. And then I saw with Vinny (Corey) coming in, it eradicated any thought at all. I didn’t think it was going to happen anyway but when Vinny took the reins it pretty much settled me that I was going to stay.”
The two weren’t of the same generation, but what’s a few years when you are on the same team anyway. Corey was 36 when he had played his last game for Monaghan in 2019. He had intended to come back the following year, but he wouldn’t be the first that Covid put off.
Almost without him realising it, The Banty had persuaded Corey to join him on the line as a selector. And when Banty stepped down, Corey was talked into the big job.
None of it by design. No grand ambitions. Just letting the days, the months and the years gently unspool, if such a term can be applied to the white-knuckle ride of Monaghan football.
“We would be close, yeah,” says McManus of Corey.
“But it is a manager-player relationship now. And that’s where it is at. He has his job to do and I have my job to do. So it’s slightly different, but we still have a tight relationship.”
You suspect Corey might have tested the relationship during this league. For a time before the return of Stephen Cluxton, McManus was the longest-serving intercounty player in the country.
But he was nowhere to be seen on the first night of the league – and a loss – at home to Armagh.
He was spared the trip to Killarney for the second-round defeat to Kerry as well.
Thereafter, the lesser-spotted McManus peeked out. Needing something from of the third game at home to Donegal, he was lifted off the bench with eight minutes left on the clock. He caught and converted two marks. He then set up fellow sub Seán Jones for a goal. They had their first win.
Against Roscommon, he got the last 13 minutes. Galway? 22 minutes.
Brought on against Tyrone as they were being reduced to 13 men, he still managed four frees in half an hour.
Which left the final day, and another escape act to remain in Division 1. Relying on Tyrone to beat Armagh, Corey picked his old reliables to face Mayo; Darren Hughes, Shane Carey, Karl O’Connell and McManus. Kieran Hughes would also appear in the second half.
McManus ended the game by kicking the penalty to take his tally to 1-7, 0-5 from play, and the subsequent mauling from yet another pitch invasion by a crowd that live for the drama.
It was O’Connell and McManus’ first start in the National league.
“(They) played the full 70-plus minutes and they will take massive confidence from that,” explains Corey.
“It’s important that those boys have the confidence of playing the full 70 minutes, and they feel fresh ending the league and going into the championship.”
The championship. McManus goes into his 17th now on Sunday. In Omagh, against Tyrone. They aren’t fancied. Same as it was in 2018 when McManus hit four of the game’s last six points, including a worldie from close to the right sideline, off his right boot to win it.
That score was in keeping with the most impressive facet of his playing career. There’s barely a forward that has produced more in the clutch moments than McManus has for Monaghan.
Such as the 2017 Ulster championship game against Cavan when Cian Mackey had put the Breffnimen ahead as the game inched into the final quarter. Up stepped McManus with a goal to win it.
The three late points against Armagh in the 2014 Ulster semi-final replay, one of them from a sideline ball.
And his time added-on heroics against the same team in a sweltering Newry in June 2021 on a day that Monaghan were honouring the memory of their under-20 captain Brendan Óg Duffy who died in a car crash the night before.
Age has not dimmed him against Tyrone, an opposition that paid him the highest compliment when he entered the pitch in last year’s league game by instantly surrounding him to goad and provoke.
They’ll be at it again this Sunday.
Win that game and potentially it could be the most championship games McManus ever plays in a season with the new format. No wonder Corey is racing him lightly.
In January past, Clontibret had a celebration evening for the minor team that won the prestigious Ulster club competition at minor level, hosted by the St Paul’s club in Belfast, on New Year’s Day, 2003.
Dessie Mone was on that team. Vinny Corey had by then passed through to adulthood but had sampled the St Paul’s tournament two years previous when they were beaten in the semi-final by a Ronan Clarke-inspired Pearse Ógs team.
McManus was the baby of the team. All three became committed to a pact that Clontibret should gobble up championships.
From 2002, the three played in no fewer than 11 Monaghan finals, the first going to a replay. They won seven of them.
“There’s a lot of bonding goes on in there,” says Mone.
“Vinny was always reliable, he always put the team first and that has carried through into his management style. He puts the team, the players first and foremost.
“Mansy battled through all those years with him and I suppose he wasn’t just going to walk away when Vinny got the role.”
Perhaps it goes back to a truism of Monaghan. This is a county where the old traditions die hard. Corey was 36 when he finished up. Mone himself played 16 seasons. Dick Clerkin made his debut in 1999 and only finished up in 2016 having played 179 times for his county. The legacy of that midfield bumping and thumping came with a hip replacement in January this year.
“There was an exceptional group there that gave it all they could for as long as they could,” admits Corey.
“You have the likes now of Karl O’Connell who is 35, Darren Hughes is 36, Conor McManus is 35. And they have every reason in the world to say, ‘I am going to head off here.’
“But they don’t. We have had a whole host of players who have done that for Monaghan, gone as hard as they could for as physically long as they could.
“It’s something you think that sticks in Monaghan. That the players coming behind will follow suit and give it their all for as long as they can.
“We don’t have a massive playing group, so for boys of that age to retire at 30, 31, it leaves you stretched.”
A furious devotion. One borne of frustration to Mone and the likes when they were so young, you’d wonder how they even recognised it.
“When we were growing up, we were looking across at Armagh. And maybe sometimes myself, Dick Clerkin, Darren Hughes would see ones going around our part of Monaghan and them wearing Armagh jerseys!” says Mone.
“Sometimes you would go around games in Monaghan and people would be wearing any jersey. We always said from a young age we wanted to change that attitude for the better.
“That’s one thing that stuck in our mind. We wanted people being proud to wear the Monaghan jersey.”
That job is done. Corey’s work is only starting though.
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