Hectic schedule for Clontibret’s Conor McManus

The problem with being this good is finding the time to be, full stop. Clontibret’s Conor McManus is supposed to be taking it easy. Resting up, taking the weight off the ankle injury that scotched his early summer and has had him carrying a leg ever since. But instead he has a variety of appointments to keep before he gets to sink into a chair for the winter. Rest will have to take a ticket and get in line.

First there's tomorrow's Ulster club semi-final against Slaughtneil. Then there's a flight to Australia on Monday – along with Slaughtneil defender Chrissy McKaigue – to join up with the International Rules squad for next Saturday's Test in Perth.

‘Dragged on’

The following weekend, he’ll either be back in

Ireland

for Clontibret’s first Ulster final in 20 years or he’ll be in

Boston

with the All Stars. He’ll meet himself coming back one of these days.

“I was supposed to get it fixed over the off-season but the on-season has dragged on for a little longer than I expected,” he says. “You just keep going until you’re out and I’ll try to sort out whatever problems there are after that. I suppose I’ll keep plugging away until it’s over and get it sorted afterwards. It’s nothing major. I’d say it just needs a bit of rest and a bit of rehab and then it will need constant attention until my career is over.”

At various points over the past month, Clontibret have looked ready to give McManus all the time off he could handle. For three games in a row now, they’ve needed to kick the last score of the game right up against the clock to squeak through. Scotstown led them by two points with four minutes of the county final to go, Kilcoo led by the same margin deep into injury-time. But they’re still standing. Woozy, maybe. But standing all the same.

“It’s a sign of how competitive these games are,” says McManus. “It’s winter football, the games are low-scoring and you’re not going to pull away from any team too handy. So there’s always a chance. The problem though is that you won’t keep getting away with it, we can’t expect to keep putting ourselves in that position and surviving. It’s good to know that we won’t panic but you’d have to imagine it will catch up with you as you meet better teams.

“In fairness, the Kilcoo game looked to be gone. I had missed a good chance to bring it back to one point and it really wasn’t looking good. But we dug in and we found a goal out of somewhere. We’ll have to stop making a habit of it. Luck runs out eventually and I’d say we’ve probably used all ours up by now.”

On balance they're probably due a splash of it, certainly in Ulster. McManus has five Monaghan medals stockpiled since 2006 but not yet a sniff of a provincial one to place alongside them. Of their four attempts so far, two have ended at the hands of the eventual All-Ireland champions, another dashed by the St Patrick's Day runners-up.

“Every club in Ulster has a hard-luck story to tell about coming up against Crossmaglen – we have two of them. In 2006 and ’07, we lost by a point two years in a row. You always look back at those two games in particular and wonder: what if. But we’re not unique in that. Most teams in Ulster and even throughout Ireland have had that experience at least once and maybe more than once.

‘Bit of experience’

“If we’ve learned anything from the bit of experience we have had in the Ulster championship over the years, it’s that you can’t look too far ahead at any point. It’s even more one-game-at-a-time than would normally be the case. Inside your own county, you’re keeping an eye on the other teams that you might be meeting down the road but you can’t in Ulster.

“I mean, look at the teams that were in with a chance even just a month ago that aren’t there now. That’s the beauty of it. There’s been a lot of shocks this year and what you have left are some teams that had been coming up short for a few years in a row and just weren’t going to accept it any more. That’s the case with us, that’s the case with Slaughtneil as well. You just get to a point where you’re going to break down the door no matter what. Enough is enough.”