GAELIC GAMES:Monaghan captain Dick Clerkin explains to MALACHY CLERKINwhy under new manager Eamon McEneaney the focus is on developing a new system and a style of play

NOTHING EVER lasts forever. But when you have a good thing going, you’ll generally get a pass for trying to make it stretch out a little longer than you should. So it was that when Séamus McEnaney sent his Monaghan team onto the pitch for what turned out to be his last provincial match – the Ulster final hiding at the hands of Tyrone last July – it contained no fewer than 10 of the players who started his first one against Derry five years earlier.

Add in JP Mone and Rory Woods, mainstays both who also started against Tyrone, and you have a core of a dozen players around whom McEnaney built his era.

It was more or less a given that when any of those 12 were fit and available, they played. When Dessie Mone nailed down a spot for good in 2007 and went on to two All Star nominations in as many years, that brought the almost-untouchables up to 13. Even though Monaghan attacked the league with gusto each season under Banty, their championship team was always as good as in situ by late-March. He’d tweak a tail here and there by sending a dummy team to the papers but he was fooling nobody.

The burden of being in charge of a county with a small pick from a shallow pool.

Or so you’d assume. The Monaghan squad has not only seen a change of management since then but also its most thorough rinsing out in well over a decade. Of the 30-man panel who got off the team bus that day in Clones, only 16 remain. Six of the original 12 fixtures are gone – Mone and Woods, goalkeeper Shane Duffy, former All Star nominee Gary McQuaid, long-time captain Damien Freeman and, most keenly-felt of all, his brother Tommy, the county’s only All Star since the 1980s. The team that faces Tyrone in Omagh tomorrow will be flushed with championship debutants, taking faltering steps into a world they don’t quite recognise yet.

“The big unknown in a player at the age of 19-20 is how they’ll handle a big championship Sunday,” says Dick Clerkin, one of the players left from the old era and this year’s captain.

“And you just won’t know that until they’re sent out into it. These young lads have shown in the league they’re well able to compete but Sunday will be a new level. All good players have to have a first day out and this will be theirs. We need two or three of them to come through for us and we’ll be on our way.

“But there’s less pressure on us having to win an Ulster title than there was before. The focus now is on developing a system and a style of play that will put us in a position to win one when the opportunity arises and also to compete at a higher level when we get to Croke Park in August. Now, that might be this year or next year or even the year after but we’ll worry about getting the style of play right first. If at that stage we’re good enough, we’ll win titles eventually because the raw materials are there.”

Clerkin was a cookie-cutter Monaghan player under the old regime. He ran all day and tackled like a ram-raider, he got in opponents’ faces and kept possession moving. They devised a game plan that essentially turned all but a handful of the team into midfielders. Get the ball, keep the ball, move it fast and get it into Freeman so that he could score or get fouled and leave a free to Paul Finlay. Everything done at pace.

Though it it suited him, he’s embraced the fact Eamon McEneaney’s Monaghan will be a different proposition.

“Eamon would have a different approach to things than Séamus would have had. It’s not that he’s more relaxed, just maybe a bit more methodical. He wouldn’t have put huge pressure on immediate results, more on the process and the long-term. He’d have been very aware that he was trying to blood in maybe a dozen fresh faces into a panel looking to play at the top level of the game.

“Training was probably a little more hell-for-leather under Séamus than it is now. People would have associated Monaghan with a very high-intensity game in those years. Not frantic but very intense. Now we’re concentrating more on what to do with the ball when we have it and a little less on frantically trying to get it back.”

Banty’s brand of energy and occasional madness couldn’t be replicated and the new man was never of a mind to try. For players who were attached to their old manager, it would have been pointless. Instead, he sat them down and asked what they thought. It was a clever way to start.

“Eamon came in and said to us, ‘Look, Séamus brought this team to such great heights, I want you to tell me where you think you have fallen down.’ And being honest about it, we had to look at the Ulster final where we just came up against a packed defence and couldn’t think our way around it. It happened in 2008 against Fermanagh too. They were set up to stop us playing direct ball into Tommy and the lads in the full-forward line and it’s fair to say we looked a little bit clueless at times.

“So we’ve tried to address that and while not moving totally away from our style of play that has served us well, being adaptable and being able to play games as you see it. And with that you’re putting a bit of responsibility on players’ shoulders. It’s up to everyone to make the right decision now instead of being reliant on a system. Teams like Tyrone are so adept at changing things around in the middle of a game, we’d hope to get to that point where we can change with them and not be caught like rabbits in the headlights like we were last year.”

That Ulster final broke their hearts and in the end broke up their team. Kildare turned off the machine six days later but Tyrone were the ones who rained down the blows. The worst of it was they fancied themselves going in. Not just them, their whole county. To be gone before half-time just emptied them out.

“It was such an extreme from one to the other. Having hit the heights we had going into the final, running up big scores against Armagh and Fermanagh that were never expected of a team like us, there were such big expectations going into that match. We competed well for the first 20 minutes but after that we played really very inept football and stuff that was naive for a bunch of players that had been around for so long. We would expect more from ourselves.

“Maybe we read too much into all the hype there was going into the game. People were talking Tyrone down and talking us up which, in hindsight, meant we were perfectly set up for a fall. Tyrone were watching all that happening and when you felt the intensity with which they played against us that day, you got the feeling that they were almost put out by the fact that they weren’t going into the game as hot favourites. You could feel that off them during the game.

“Redemption would be too strong a word for what we’re after on Sunday but we’ll be definitely out to prove that it wasn’t a true reflection of what we’re about. We didn’t do ourselves justice.”

The road back starts in Omagh. With a lot of new faces in the caravan.