Magnificent obsession running in the family

SEAMUS McENANEY INTERVIEW:Something great is stirring in Monaghan football and their manager is totally tuned in to it

IN THE late summer of last year a day unexpectedly fragranced with surprise. Croke Park in sunshine and shadow and a live current running through the place. We are on the verge of sensation. Sixty-six minutes gone; Monaghan have a two-point lead; Kerry look as surprised as we are. But they look jaded too.

Monaghan are all all tricks and jinks but the prestidigitation is laid over hard discipline. Look at Gary McQuaid, muscularly majestic in the breach. This is no random day in the summer. This is a well executed coup.

Monaghan are going to do this. Aren't they? They are going to perform this heist in front of our eyes. Kerry have blown it. Kerry wielded the syringe of a Declan O'Sullivan goal less than 10 minutes ago, but instead of drowsy submission it induced the response of two Monaghan points.

But, but, but . . . the big teams have the best subs. Bryan Sheehan is on and he is floating like a Maurice Fitz, stinging like one also. Two points. Level. This Monaghan defence, sturdy and stern as bouncers, never laid a finger on him.

A draw surely. Morally that would be right. But this is football . . .

And this is Tomás Ó Sé. Bursting exuberantly from the half-back line as if this were a training stint on a lazy Saturday in Killarney. He swaps passes with the Gooch and fists a point, killing Monaghan softly.

Séamus "Banty" McEnaney speaks afterwards, his plain passion and his pain the last visible signs of the game we all know and love before the tight-lipped men who says nothing with various degrees of articulacy take over.

"Like having your heart removed without surgery," says Banty.

Banty's boys do their weekly toils out in Annayalla, between Castleblayney and Clontibret. Heartland stuff for Monaghan football but with a contemporary twist. Prunty pitches and the generous wash of floodlight from the looming pylons.

Marty McElkennon, possibly Gaelic football's most progressive trainer, putting them through their paces.

Banty says his boys think no further ahead than any given Sunday but in Annayalla the work has a longer-term focus. Best to be prepared for the joys of summer. This coming championship Monaghan will stand in the klieg-light glare that is trained on contenders.

Their arrival as box-office stars seems surprising but they have progressed incrementally every year of late and as we enter the post-puke-football era, Monaghan offer the most sparkling cocktail of pressure football and high adventure. And they've left little calling cards: that late larceny against Meath in 2005 to win the Division Two league final; that seven-point trimming of Dublin in Parnell Park; intermittent patches of brilliance against Tyrone in a qualifier in Croke Park; and of course last summer's defiantly brilliant stand against Kerry. Something is cooking.

Séamus McEnaney was christened Banty one day by his father, JJ. When he was nine the young fella was brought home to the farm and presented to his father with a newly diagnosed case of pigeon-chestedness. JJ smiled and named his son affectionately for the feisty bantam hen. The name stuck fast and it suits his busy, scratching nature.

Growing up on farmland in Corduff. Monaghan football burgled the banks of Banty's youthful imagination. He came into his teenage years just as the county were coming into the last time of their ascendancy. He reckons that since he was 13 or so he has missed three, maybe four, of Monaghan's games in league or championship. Twenty-five years of steadfast love following the team to Waterford, Sligo, Cork or Croker, ebbing and flowing with their fortunes.

He followed the boys to the National League title back in 1985. Their next national would be three years ago. League Division Two. The boys followed him this time. Although he wouldn't see it that way. These boys are friends and they are family.

He grew up in a farmhouse within the walls of which football was deemed to be a staff of life. Five brothers and all of them played on the Corduff team at the one time for 10 years from the mid-80s onward. JJ McEnaney managed that team for a few seasons with his five boys playing on it.

JJ died in 1996, three years after seeing Corduff win the junior double in Monaghan but two years before they would win the intermediate championship and go senior for the first time in the club's history.

"The big year in the club, I suppose, was 1998. We won the intermediate championship. It was the first time ever to go senior in the history of the club. I was player-manager, my brother Tom was a selector, and the three other lads (Pat, the well known intercounty referee, Frank, the former Monaghan midfielder and Michael) were playing. Frank was captain.

"Aw! It was serious. Unbelievable. And the beauty of it was that our opponents, Inniskeen, were five to one on to win the game. That same year we had only won three league matches but we went and won the championship. Beat Inniskeen by four points in the final. We scored 3-10 from play on the day."

The details pour out like so much other football data that gets compressed and stored in his football brain. These days he still works the home farm and is a successful nightclub owner and publican but the place football occupied in the McEnaney home is preserved in his head. You ask if he gets much thinking about the game done when he is out on the farm. He laughs.

"Thinking about football? Football! Do I think about it on the farm! Sometimes in the office. To tell you the truth, I never stop thinking about it. In these jobs, every live moment, every waking moment you are thinking about football. Some part of it.

"You work around that passion. It is a serious commitment. The time it takes up is serious. I'm not complaining, though.

"I love this job. I love managing Monaghan. We are progressing over two or three years. I love it."

And for all the state-of-the-art facilities Monaghan give to their teams, for all the latent passion which has been stored beneath the surface, this is what McEnaney brings to the table. A knowledge of the art of the possible, born out of experience in Corduff and a passion for the game and his county which borders (happily) on being obsessive.

The first two years of his tenure after he took a job reuniting him with a core of players he had worked with at under-21 level were periods of consolidation. Small steps taken while Ulster was still the domain of giants. What struck anybody exposed to Monaghan, vintage 2005/2006, was the disciplined excellence of their football. When they were good they were very good and when they were bad they were just inexperienced. Every year they took enough steps forward to keep themselves encouraged. Even an ill-fated stint in Division One of the National League, a tier for which they weren't quite ready, was marked by good performances and narrow defeats to teams like Kerry and Tyrone.

There were setbacks. Having mugged Meath late in the Division Two league final of 2005, they suffered the same fate at their victims' hands last year, when a virtually flawless league campaign led to a comprehensive seven-point defeat by Meath in the Division Two league semi-final. They got knocked down. They got up again. Meath's weapon was a barrage of high early balls. Monaghan went away and learned.

Their learning this past year or so has been supplemented by the professorial teaching not just of Banty but of Marty McElkennon, who was recruited to Monaghan's cause through sheer persistence: opening his door four Saturday evenings in a row to find McEnaney's obsessive persona on the stoop.

Monaghan's sessions are unrelentingly intense and inventive but the bigger picture is a team who know what they are doing and a side who are relentlessly self critical.

"The past 15 months we have been getting players that are good enough and capable enough into the squad," says McEnaney. "And the attitudes of those players have been class. Absolutely class. They have responded very well to Marty's training. I believe he is one of the best trainers in the country - even if Monaghan don't win another game this year, I would still be saying that."

They are handling the business of following up on last season with cool wisdom. Having gone close against Kerry the temptation in many counties would have been to get back into the sweatshop in October and start racking up the sessions.

"We didn't come back in too quick. If people wonder are Monaghan going to burn out I don't think so. This is a new team and we didn't come together as a complete unit till Stephen's Day. We are not on the go long. Not like a team going for 10 years. We are fresh and hungry. Whether we like it or not we had a good year, progress-wise, in 2007 but we won nothing."

So this year began with a poor McKenna Cup campaign and two solid league wins over Roscommon and Cavan, neither of which pleased Banty overly.

"There were parts where we gave away ball, times where we didn't win enough ball in around the field. Several areas where we weren't happy."

Something is happening in Monaghan, though, detectable through the numbers of kids wearing county jerseys in any town you drive through, in the crowds that have flocked to those league games and will do so again to greet Armagh. Something cooking.

Banty, a man who has followed the county team as more of a disciple than a fan for quarter of a century, turns away from the clamour: "Those things are side issues. We have a job to do. In life in general, the clap on the back is a couple of inches away from the kick in the arse. I'm just worrying about the next kick in the arse.

"What happens outside of our family or our group is beyond us. We can only decide what happens inside it. Our expectation is only the next game. Next game is Armagh. You keep a good, tight-knit group. You talk about the next game. That's it."

The discipline comes naturally. Football is football.

When he went to the executive of the club as a young fella of 27 and laid out his plans for the senior team if they made him player-manager they might not have appreciated his earnestness. All was clear though on the day of the first game. The club's two leading players were dropped for the opening game, for socialising on the Saturday night.

Frank McEnaney, the most talented of the five brothers and Monaghan's midfield stalwart, found himself lollipopped by his younger brother. So did George McKittrick, the club's under-21 star.

"I would be a couple of years younger than Frank," laughs Banty. "But we had to set down a marker. I brought him in that day, we needed him to win that game. He took it no bother. So did George. It drew a line. They took it 100 per cent. No problems for the rest of the year."

When JJ McEnaney got older, father and son farmed the land together and a natural closeness which had expressed itself in a common love of a game was hardened through working the soil together.

"My father was very football-oriented, a great man. Being born and reared on the farm and the only way to get away as a young fella was for football. You were never excused for anything else. Even if you wanted to go somewhere socially you would always say it was football.

"If you wanted to get away on a Saturday to town or the pictures it was always football or training. You'd bring the bag with you. Football above all else."

The primacy of the game in his life and in his thoughts and his home ensures Monaghan will be back if sheer will and excellence have anything to do with it.

The most personable manager in football will be on another bus down to Croke Park sitting in the back with the boys and, as is his wont, watching Father Ted or Killinascully and having the craic.

"Last year and Kerry? It drives you on. If tragedies happen a lot of families get tighter. We would be the same in the football sense. Nothing was said for about half an hour in that dressingroom that day. It's not what is said sometimes, it's how you react. 2007 is long over for us now. It doesn't matter anymore."

Five or six nights a week now football consumes him.

"I'm lucky there is a great woman at home, my wife, Rosemary, who loves her football. But it's full circle. Now I have to pretend it's something else I'm going to. I'd get away to go to some other meeting. But not bloody football again!"

Heart fully restored to stout chest, he leaves you. Football man, Monaghan man. An obsessive with work to be done.