In Monaghan, it’s been a year of chasing with their tongues hanging out. Of far too often feeling like they’re a day late and a dollar short. Ten points down against Derry, seven down against Armagh, 12 behind against Mayo. Finding a way back each time to popular acclaim. All the while wishing they stopped making it all so hard on themselves.
It’s given them one of the most eye-catching seasons of any team in the championship. Huge momentum swings and last-minute equalisers, thrilling hooter-beaters and a couple of extra-times. Ultimately though, back-to-back defeats in Clones have left them staring down the barrel against Roscommon this weekend. The drama is enjoyable for everyone else. For them, it’s just very, very annoying.
“Everyone’s clapping you on the back,” says Rory Beggan. “But you’re sitting there in meeting rooms going, ‘Why? Why is this happening? Why are we only suddenly starting playing the football of our lives in the game whenever we’re 10 or 11 down?’
“It’s a question we still probably haven’t put our finger on but hopefully there’s an answer for it this weekend. You’re into the part of the championship now where you can just not afford to do it. Teams are a wee bit sharper now, they’ve got more championship games under their belt and it’s do or die. No team is going to allow you back in with that sort of deficit.
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“Especially this weekend. You lose, you’re gone. That’s it. You’re not meeting up till November. So you don’t want to have to be in that position. We’re well used to it if it does happen. But for us, we just want to make sure that when you’re in the second half, that it’s close or you’re ahead. That’s realistically what the aim is.”
If the season does end this weekend, deliberations over the identity of Monaghan’s player of the season won’t take long. Beggan is their leading scorer so far, with 0-15 to his name in four games (five two-point frees and five 45s). His interventions coming out the field have been crucial to their three stand-out goals – one that he put on a plate for Micheál Bannigan against Derry and the two he set in motion the last day against Mayo.
He was a key player in the full-time drama in the Derry game, when he and Davy Garland convinced referee Paddy Neilan to change his mind and allow Jack McCarron to try for an equalising two-pointer from the sideline. Largely forgotten in the hullabaloo afterwards was the fact that it was Beggan who kicked the winner that day, a two-point free from 47 metres at the end of extra-time.
This is Beggan’s 16th year on the Monaghan panel and his 14th as their number one. According to the journalist Colm Shalvey, whose record-keeping in these matters borders on the heroic, Beggan has played 66 championship games for Monaghan, putting him third on their all-time list behind Conor McManus and Darren Hughes. He has scored 0-104, grouping him with McManus, Tommy Freeman, Paul Finlay and Jack McCarron as Monaghan players with over 100 championship points.
“I haven’t lost a love for it at all,” he says. “It probably isn’t life or death for me the way it would have been maybe 10 years ago all right. But that’s probably no harm either. There was a time when everything I would have done on the football pitch, whether it was a mistake or something you’ve done well, I would always just have worked on it that week.
“Now you’re probably just focusing on a lot of other things in life. Football’s a part of it and I still put a massive emphasis on my football. But I don’t get too down with the losses and I don’t get too high with the wins any more compared to what I was.
“When we lost the Ulster final, it was tough because we were so close in the game. And winning another Ulster title is still a huge ambition – our last one was 2015 at this stage. But it was a case of, ‘Right. We can’t dwell on this for a week. Let’s get back at it and give this All-Ireland our full focus.’ Getting back on that horse, I don’t think it was as hard as maybe it would have been over the years.”
Beggan made his championship debut against Antrim in 2013 and has been through every evolution of the game since then. More than that, he’s led some of it. When blanket defences got to nihilistic levels towards the end of the last decade, he was one of the first goalkeepers to regularly involve himself in open play in the opposition half. It didn’t always go well.
While the idea was sound – if the other crowd brings every man back, adding a goalkeeper was the best way to find an overload – the execution was difficult. Beggan had been a stay-at-home goalkeeper all his life. Occasionally, when he got turned over in the opposition half, he looked every inch of it. The Beggan who hit Stephen Mooney with a 70-yard outside-of-the-boot kick pass a fortnight ago wasn’t much in evidence. The critics weren’t kind.
“Beggan isn’t one of the intercounty goalkeepers who plays outfield for his club and, without being too cruel about it, you can tell,” wrote Darragh Ó Sé in these pages in 2022. “I’ve said it before – Conor McManus couldn’t do for Monaghan what Beggan does. But Beggan does Monaghan no favours by trying to be Conor McManus.”
Spin the tape on and Beggan’s technical development as a Gaelic footballer has been one of the achievements of his career. All the more so for the fact that it was so boundary-breaking to even try it.
After all, he’d have been known as one of the stand-out goalkeepers of his era even if he’d never crossed the halfway line. His kick-outs, shot-stopping and place-kicking would have been plenty. But as long as there was a way he could help, he was willing to give it a go, whatever the teething problems.
“When the whole era of me coming out and playing happened, I was involved a lot more in the in-house games, getting on the ball. And in a Monaghan training session, when you’re on ball, you’re always going to be pressured when you’re taking on a kick pass. When it wasn’t happening, I knew that players were wondering, ‘Well, why the f**k is he coming up here if he can’t play a simple kick-pass?’
“So you had to work on it. Part of your goalkeeping training now would be, you come and claim a high ball and you might have to hit a kick-pass out to a boy on the run from 30, 40 yards away. I always would have thought I had a good kick pass on me, it’s refining that to make sure it’s an advantage.
“It’s very easy to kick a ball to a man’s chest when you’re doing a straight line kicking drill. But at intercounty level, more or less everything is game-based and the best way to improve player skill is by forcing them to make a decision. I’m working on it long enough now to back myself when the scenario comes up.”
So on he goes. Beggan’s first game for Monaghan was against Sligo in Division Three in March 2013, at a time when you wouldn’t necessarily have been wishing a 14-season career on a lad who was still only 20. He came up and kicked a 45 that day, the first of his 236 points in league and championship. They lost to Roscommon during that campaign, a scurvy dog of a game in the Hyde that ended 0-8 to 0-7. Different times for everyone.
The game has changed and Beggan’s place within it has changed accordingly. Every opposition makes a plan for him now, often preferring to usher a Monaghan forward into the scoring zone than commit a foul anywhere within 50-55 metres of the goal.
He comes out to catch kick-outs, he scores from play. Not all the time, not even most of the time. But sometimes, when the day is getting hectic and everyone’s eyes are on stalks, he pops up and plucks a ball and gets Monaghan rolling. It doesn’t always work but they’re able to make their accommodation with that. Because they know that when it does, he’s a club the other teams don’t have in their bag.
“It’s not sustainable,” he says. “It’s very risky, obviously. If you come up for a kick-out, once you’re caught and they win a break with you out of goal, it’s chaotic. The whole team is just scrambling back then. So it’s not something you can play for 70 minutes.
“It’s probably just out of desperation. Like, we’re not going to go feebly out of the Ulster championship. Let’s throw everything we can at it here. And with the new game, it’s all about momentum. You can do a lot of your damage in patches. That’s what you want to go after.
“And we seem to just ... we really do make hay in those sorts of times when we really go at it. We’d like that we’re not in that situation, that it’s a more controlled game. And we still feel we’re good at doing that as well. But it’s just sometimes the game has just got away from us and we’re just thinking, ‘Right, nothing to lose here, let’s go.’”
Whether it’s the right thing to do or not, it has made them one of the most watchable teams in the championship. The Rossies come to Clones as a crew that rank high in that respect too. It’s not going to end 0-8 to 0-7, we can be sure of that much at least.
We can be fairly sure Rory Beggan will have his say somewhere along the way. He generally does.
