All-Ireland SFC round robin group stage: Monaghan v Meath (Sunday, 3pm, Kingspan Breffni, live on GAA GO)
MONAGHAN are a bit like a vintage car.
Successive management teams going right back to Seamus McEnaney’s first term have treated it with great care, love and affection.
From Banty to Malachy O’Rourke to Vinny Corey, they’ve known its value, what it was capable of and what it wasn’t, when it was ready for the show and when to spend the weekend in the garage minding it.
It kept them in Division One for almost an entire decade, took them to two Ulster titles, made them very credible for two All-Ireland semi-finals.
They’ve been The Good Years but a bit of the bad has been mixed through the entire time.
Qualifier defeats by Offaly (2011), Laois (2012), Longford (2016), those Ulster semi-final losses to Fermanagh and Down against the grain, the flat final year under Malachy O’Rourke in 2019 – it was just impossible to stay up every summer given the small playing pool and the effort that went into preserving their Division One status.
This has been a bad year. The worst. They haven’t won a game since January 27, that opening night Croke Park victory that made us all sit up and think
It’s safe to say that right now, Monaghan do not look like a team destined for the same depths of the championship they made it to last year.
It is hard to imagine them making Dublin scramble for cover in an All-Ireland semi-final.
Transition has been something they’ve tried to manage over a number of years. The generation behind the McManus and Hughes’ and Wylies just haven’t gotten themselves to the standard yet.
You’re looking at this weekend’s teamsheet and seeing Thomas McPhillips, Andrew Woods, Sean Jones and David Garland all among the subs. They were the first of the new batch promoted but have been passed out for starting berths by Michael Hamill, Ciaran McNulty, Joel Wilson and Jason Irwin.
That’s bound to be a disappointment for Vinny Corey.
Garland was named Higher Education Footballer of the Year after winning a Sigerson Cup with DCU four years ago. He was still playing in the competition with UCD earlier this year, but has never pushed his way in properly with Monaghan.
Jones and Woods are different players physically. They both looked to be shaping promisingly a couple of seasons ago but again, neither of them have kicked on. They’ve lost Karl Gallagher to the AFL as well and the departure of Niall Kearns from the scene, it’s all added up.
And it could get tougher before it gets easier. Conor McManus is almost certainly in the final throes and there are others who might be thinking of it.
The heel of the hunt is that they just haven’t been able to manage the transition from one team to the next as well as they would have liked and it’s left them in a limbo state.
It’s a state still good enough to see them past Meath.
Colm O’Rourke has discovered the harsh realities of life outside the studio this summer. Dublin battered them, Kerry walked through them but most disappointingly, they were second best by quite a distance to Louth.
O’Rourke had wanted them to establish themselves as Leinster’s second-best team that would grow to challenge the Dubs, but they look further away than ever.
Against Kerry, Meath just waved the white flag. They dropped off the kickouts, sat back inside their own 45′ and still conceded 0-10 in the first half and 2-8 in the second. The two goals could have been four or five.
Monaghan didn’t fare any better in Killarney. And while the scale of Kerry’s victories indicated the gap between these two and the top end at the minute, it was a lot more about their attacking struggles than their defensive ones.
Meath scored 0-9 against Louth and 0-9 against Kerry. Monaghan hit 1-11 in Kerry and were lucky to get 2-10 against Louth, gifted a goal that brought them back into a game that was getting away from them.
The draw they salvaged makes no difference in terms of this game. Realistically the best Monaghan can do is third, and a draw with Meath would have been enough to secure even if Louth had beaten them.
From there, the winners’ options are most likely Galway, Armagh, Dublin, Mayo, Tyrone or Donegal. Do either of these two beat any of those six away from home?
Survival in the All-Ireland is the prize this weekend. Monaghan ought to earn it.