It started auspiciously. Vinny Corey made his championship debut for Monaghan the day the county downed the champions. Back in May 2003, Armagh weren’t just the holders of the Anglo-Celt Cup but also the Sam Maguire.
If there is one theme from the now departed Monaghan manager’s playing career, it was an extraordinary level of consistency, spread across a range of positions in which he was deployed.
In that, he was almost symbolic of the county: mending and making do at the very top level. As a player, he lined out nearly everywhere between full back and full forward. In the championship he played in three of the five lines and discharged orthodox duties.
Switched from one square to the other in the 2007 Ulster final, he nearly turned the match and saw two late goal chances go agonisingly uncashed – one brilliantly saved and the other crashed off the bar.
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His physicality made him more of a provider up front but later that year, the full-forward line of him, Ciarán Hanratty and Tommy Freeman put the fear of God into Kerry during a famous All-Ireland quarter-final, which the then champions won by a point.
There is a thread of Corey being asked to go wherever fires needed to be extinguished and so after reprising the full forward role against Kerry in a qualifier, a year later he was switched to try to curtail Kieran Donaghy at the other end.
Similarly, he was often switched between centre back and full back according to who needed minding but wherever he played, it was done with commitment and application. “When Vinny was fit and selected, he always turned up,” is one summary.
And he was generally both fit and selected, missing very few championship matches in a 17-year intercounty career.
It was a surprise to many that Corey decided to pull the plug after two years of management, but factor in those 17 years and the immediate acceptance of a selector’s role with Séamus McEnaney, followed by reluctant elevation to management for the past two years and the picture is less complicated.
The “reluctance” in his management had nothing to do with a lack of desire to help the county but a feeling that he might be a better manager were he to wait a bit longer. Neither did it affect his steely commitment to the job once it was accepted.
Two years ago, the Monaghan county executive was struggling to find a successor for McEnaney and a parade of candidates, both from outside the county – Ger Brennan, who has had a fine debut season with Louth but who at the time had little intercounty experience – and inside, came and went.
Corey was the one they wanted and eventually he accepted.
The first year was typical Monaghan, survival in Division One followed by a terrific, late-goal defeat of Tyrone in the Ulster championship and a great recovery from a bit of a trimming by Derry in the next match, all of which culminated in reaching an All-Ireland semi-final by beating Armagh and a respectable tussle with eventual champions Dublin.
This year has been different and undermined by injury and player unavailability – to the extent of having to play 13-a-side on a training weekend away. For the first time in 10 years, the Division One tenancy was lost and although that diminishes pressure for next season, the team that has punched spectacularly above its weight for a decade is breaking up.
It was a difficult year that started positively with an exciting league win in Croke Park on the opening weekend of the season. A second win didn’t materialise until the All-Ireland group match against Meath and yet that was enough to advance to the preliminary quarter-finals where eventual finalists Galway had to scramble to beat them.
The exceptional talent and temperament of Conor McManus was all but retired after that championship exit in June and the departure of his Clontibret clubmate probably puts the matter beyond speculation.
There has been no official word on the reason why Corey decided to go but intercounty management is a major challenge in terms of time. He would, for example, turn up at team meetings on a Tuesday with a mound of work done on match analysis and the gathering of illustrative video clips.
His teaching career recently went up a gear with his appointment as vice-principal of Largy College in Clones.
It is further testament to Monaghan’s amazing ability to keep stride that the immediate supply lines are not too forbidding. Even with the departure of experienced players, regeneration has been impressive: Ulster minor titles in 2018 and 2019 as well as finalists in 2020 and 2023, and an All-Ireland final rerun of the Ulster decider, against Derry.
The county has been recent provincial finalists at under-20 and this season lost narrowly in the semi-final to a Tyrone team that won the All-Ireland.
The one concern arising from Monday’s news is that a managerial successor is not immediately obvious and despite the emerging talent, there is anxiety as to how the rebuild will work in the years to come or even next year, given that the county championship is already up and running.
They have, however, been lucky to have someone of the calibre of Corey to take them this far. Hopes will endure that even as he takes a well-deserved break, it might turn out not to have been his last tour of duty.
