Conor McManus won’t let his standards drop heading into his 17th championship season

On Saturday nights back then, the summer was a runway with no perimeter fence.

It was 2007 and Conor McManus was in his first year as a senior inter-county footballer. Monaghan went on a spree through the championship, making a first Ulster final since he was a toddler and scaring the life out of Kerry in Croke Park in August. He was 19, guzzling down life by the gallon.

The night before a game, he’d go into Monaghan town with his friends and they’d drive around looking for mischief. He’d be sitting in the back of the car, passing the time, watching the world froth and bubble away. Part of it but apart. Happy that he was having the best of all worlds. He’d think nothing of rattling into a pizza around 10.30 and heading home sometime after midnight.

“Very different now!” he laughs, 35 years of age and starting his 17th championship season.

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“Now I’m at home with rubber bands lying beside me. I have massage balls, massage guns, TENS machines. You name it, I have them all! I’m stretching away the night before a game now to get ready. You’d love to be young and carefree but you’re ticking every box.”

Seventeen seasons. If his longevity is impressive, his durability is borderline miraculous. McManus has never missed a championship game through injury or suspension.

He was an unused sub in that Kerry game in 2007 but has started every championship match since. When he togs out in Omagh tomorrow against Tyrone, it will be his 65th championship appearance, and his 60th consecutive start.

This might be his last go-around and then again it might not. His hips aren’t great but they’re effectively no worse now that they were when he was 28 and he’s long since come to an accommodation on that front. They’re basically junior partners in his coalition government – he can abuse away in the knowledge they’re not going to quit on him now, not after all they’ve been through together.

The winter just gone was the first time he ever granted even limited head space to the idea of retirement. But he shooed it away in an instant once it became clear that his friend and clubmate Vinny Corey would be taking over as manager.

Every team McManus has played on for club and county since he was 17 has featured Corey as a team-mate, a captain or a selector. He was never going to let him walk into inter-county management alone.

“Not a chance, no,” he says. “Once Vinny got the job, any thoughts like that went to the back of my mind. And I wasn’t really thinking about it, to be honest. It wasn’t even that I thought about retiring, it was more that it was the first time I acknowledged that it might be coming at some stage.

“Over the years, I would have seen players like Damien Freeman, Owen Lennon, Dick Clerkin, Dessie Mone, even Vinny himself – them boys all played on until they were 34, 35, 36. So if they did it, why wouldn’t I do it? It’s nearly expected of you.

“At the same time, I certainly wouldn’t be doing it if I didn’t feel I had something to add. There’s no way I would be hanging around here just looking to be in a Monaghan squad, just to say you’ve been there for 17 or 18 years. You wouldn’t put yourself through it for that.

“You stay because you feel you have something to add, because there’s a group there that can be successful, because you want to be part of that.”

The question of what success looks like or is possible for Monaghan has changed radically across the span of his career. He started life in the old Division 2A, playing league matches against London in Ruislip and Leitrim in Cloone. The squad he joined had been knocked out of the previous year’s Tommy Murphy Cup at the quarter-final stage.

The idea that a Monaghan career would offer up the kind of matches where you could win three All Stars or captain Ireland or be the country’s leading scorer in a championship season would have been laughable for anyone at the time. For a skinny cub who hadn’t even made the championship panel in his minor year? Ludicrous.

So he’ll define success his own way, thanks all the same. He bristles when he hears bits and pieces of sniping at his team for their enjoyment of the now-annual Division One rescue act.

McManus looks around his dressingroom these nights and he sees maybe 20 players who’ve only ever played top-flight football. Every one of them have cut their teeth against the best players, the canniest systems, the wiliest managers. Iron sharpens iron.

“It’s something that’s often put to you – Monaghan are expending themselves too much in the league and they’ve no energy in the championship. I don’t subscribe to that at all.

“You want to start every year in Division One. It puts you in the conversation. You know you have a player if he can hold his own in it. That’s what’s ultimately going to help you in the championship.

“Now look, it hasn’t in recent years. We’ve been disappointing, that’s the reality. But if we’d been in Division Two, would it have been any different? I don’t believe so.

“We want to be winning Ulster championships. We want to be contending for All-Irelands. Plenty of people will tell you it’s not possible or it won’t happen. But the one thing that’s certain is Division One football is where you want to be.

“In 2020, we had a good lead on Cavan and we threw it away. In 2021, we lost the Ulster final by a point. Both of those years, there was no back door or second chance. Last year, we lost to Derry.

“That means each of the last three years we were beaten by the Ulster champions. So we haven’t been a million miles away. But I don’t buy the idea that playing one of those years in Division Two would have changed the outcome. I don’t see the rationale there.”

Their final-day escape this time around featured a classic McManus late-spring command performance. In his only start of the league campaign, he scored 1-7 against Mayo without kicking a free – five points from play, two from marks, the goal from a penalty.

His spot kick deep in injury-time sealed a six-point win and meant Corey’s first campaign ended in hugs and huddles and fist-pumps all-round.

He always knew it was only a matter of time before his clubmate found himself in the big job. Corey played in every line of the Monaghan team, sometimes as a square peg who took it on himself to try to fit in the round hole so that nobody else would have to.

McManus remembers a newspaper interview Corey did one time where he talked about going out to train and play even though he had three kids at home and how it was good for them to see their father commit himself to something bigger than himself.

“I read that and thought, ‘Why didn’t I think of that?” McManus says. “But that’s Vinny. He’s doing that for Monaghan for 20 years. He always looks at things through a different lens. He always puts a different spin on things. That’s what separates him from the pack in terms of players who might become managers.

“When he was captain in 2010, he cracked his ankle in training the week before the Ulster final. If you had seen that ankle two or three days before the game, you could push your finger into it, it was that swollen. I remember that whole week, me and him went everywhere. We went to wishing wells, we went to quacks, we went to every cure going.

“He put himself through so much just to be able to run out on to the field. It didn’t work out and he missed the whole club season. But he was willing to do anything for Monaghan then and that’s how he’s always been.”

To Omagh, then. According to records kept by the ever-fastidious Northern Standard reporter Colm Shalvey, McManus is both Monaghan’s all-time leader in championship appearances – he’s one ahead of Corey, as it happens – and obviously, an ocean clear at the top of the county’s scoring charts too.

He’s scored 9-258 in his 64 matches (Paul Finlay is next on 0-151, fact fans). The conversation around the identity of his county’s greatest ever player has become a short one.

He still has itches to scratch, all the same. Tyrone’s status as the gleeful wrecking ball swinging towards any hint of Monaghan momentum is well-worn territory at this stage.

Less certain is how the rhythms of the 2023 championship are going to play out. Is trying to win Ulster even a smart idea any more?

“Nobody really knows. People talk about expending energy in Division One – we have to beat Tyrone, then probably Derry, then maybe Armagh. That’s serious energy expended. But at the same time, you want to win everything that’s put in front of you.

“Tyrone aren’t going to be thinking this isn’t worth winning if it’s tight with 15 minutes to go and neither are we. It’s probably hard for managers to decide what’s right but in the heat of the game, you’re just going to go for it.”

They know no other way.