AN EMOTIONAL SEAMUS ‘Banty’ McEnaney paid tribute to the Monaghan squad after their season concluded with an Ulster final defeat to Tyrone yesterday.
The Farney endured a difficult few weeks on the back of the tragic death of U20 captain Brendan Óg Ó Dufaigh, shortly after team sponsor Philip Traynor also passed away.
Speaking after the narrow one-point defeat to Tyrone in Croke Park, McEneaney tried to sum how much those deaths impacted him.
“I couldn’t be any more proud of the group of players. Proud to be from Monaghan his last month. We had a difficult couple of weeks.
“First it started with the loss of our sponsor, a personal friend of my own, Philip Traynor. It was a huge loss.
“Then we lost Brendan Óg Ó Dufaigh, which was a huge loss, but our group stayed really focused. And I just want to say about both those people. Philip Traynor has been immense for Monaghan GAA from I started managing in 2004, for 17 years.
“He was a supporter of Monaghan, he was a financial supporter of Monaghan. He was everything you would look to be good about Monaghan and he was also a personal friend.
“Maybe to move to Ogie then. We have spoke a lot about Ogie of the last couple of weeks and maybe something that was missed, how good of a footballer he was.
“He started with Monaghan under 20s for three years in a row. He started with me three years ago (with the minors). He started last year and he started this year (with the U20s).
“This man had an awful lot give to Monaghan, and he had an awful lot (more) to give.
“And that’s disappointing…”he said as he held back the tears.
“He’s a lad that’s going to be missed out of our dressing room and I’m disappointed we lost him in such circumstances.”
On the game itself, McEneaney felt the damage was done in the first-half which they lost by five points.
“Coming in today we had only lost one game in 2021,” he said.
“We were confident we’d give a performance. We felt the game as a 50/50 game. Unfortunately we didn’t bring enough energy, enough aggression, enough of what we wanted to bring to the first quarter anyhow.
“We talked about it at half-time and we looked for fight and we looked for all those things, and we got all those things.
“We said before the game it was a 50/50 game and it would be down to small margins.
“It ended up being down to very small margins. Maybe a shot option or a pass here or a pass there that went astray.
“Listen, we fought tooth and nail. We took it down to the wire. We took it down to the last seconds.”
After goalkeeper Rory Beggan was caught out by a long Niall Morgan kick-out before racing back and intercepting from Mattie Donnelly late in the day, McEnaney felt it might have turned the tide in Monaghan’s favour.
“I thought Rory Beggan’s tackle was actually an Ulster Championship winning tackle that would win us the game,” he said.
“And we got an opportunity after that but, unfortunately, it would go down in the memory of a lot of people had that ended up in us winning the game. It was an unbelievable recovery.”
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