It’s like Kavanagh said – the gods make their own importance. Monaghan beat the All Ireland champions by 0-13 to 0-7 in Clones yesterday but even that sort of boast felt altogether too grand last night. This was local, this was parochial. What it says about the grander scheme of things didn’t much matter to them. What mattered was that for the first time since 1988, they are Ulster champions.
They fed Donegal through more or less the same kind of mincer Jim McGuinness’s side have perfected themselves.
Breathless intensity from the start, a blanket defence of iron will and huge concentration and a forward line that kept the sillier shot choices to a minimum. Kieran Hughes made Eamonn McGee look ordinary, Drew Wylie kept Colm McFadden on the periphery of the game all day. Dessie Mone looked like Karl Lacey in a white shirt.
And all of it against every bit of received wisdom in the run up to the game. Outside of London’s various gaiscí, it was the biggest shock of a championship that probably needed one.
The relentless roll of the big teams towards the quarter-finals a fortnight from now had left the whole thing feeling a little moribund.
Yet again, the oldest motivation in sport worked its magic. Nobody believed in Monaghan but themselves. But then how could anyone? After crawling through the easier side of the draw, they looked fodder for a Donegal show of strength. We all knew Monaghan would hang with them for much of it. We couldn’t have seen them winning by six points.
“You’re bound to get a bit of energy out of that,” said Malachy O’Rourke. “But we could understand why it was because Donegal have been brilliant in the championship over the last number of years. And we didn’t play all that well.
“But I knew there was a big performance in the boys and I told them that. People were judging us on the performances against Antrim and Cavan and we weren’t judging ourselves on those performances. We knew there was more to come and luckily enough that’s what happened today.
“An awful lot of them boys have given an awful lot to football and that was one of the things that pushed us. Donegal wanted to come here and win three-in-a-row but the lads there have put so much into football and made so many sacrifices and hadn’t got any silverware. So it was a big motivating factor and it was a big chance and they didn’t want to let it up too easy.”
Monaghan were 0-4 to 0-0 up after eight minutes and didn’t let Donegal score until the 32nd minute. The All-Ireland champions lost Mark McHugh to an early concussion and his absence left their defensive system in ruins. The McGee brothers had no protection in front of them and left Kieran Hughes and Conor McManus to make hay. They ended with three points apiece, Hughes vying with Mone for Man of the Match.
“It is just total elation,” said McManus. “You don’t know what to do afterwards. But this is what we have been preparing for, this is what we have been working for. We set out at the start of the year to get promotion, to win a league final in Croke Park and to win an Ulster Championship so I make that three out of three.
"Malachy has been absolutely brilliant. He just came in and gave us a real sense of fresh air. We had just suffered two relegations on the bounce and Malachy came in, he took it just one game at a time and he brought us to Croke Park for a league final and we went back to work then for five or six weeks to prepare for a championship. It has just been magic, the whole thing."
Their mojo
For Donegal, the inquest will have to be rapid and brief. They have Laois next weekend and will go in wondering where exactly they left their mojo.
At times here yesterday, you were hard pushed to work out where their next score was coming from. None of their forwards scored from play. For the last 15 minutes, they were reduced to sticking Michael Murphy at full-forward and hammering high balls in at him.
McGuinness has a job on his hands turning them around in the space of a week.
“No excuses, the better team won,” he said. “That’s the bottom line. They came here with a lot of hunger, a lot of passion you have to take your hat off to them. For us now we have been very good champions up until this point and we need to be that now.
“Things weren’t going right for us . . . For me that’s what football is all about. You have to stay with it when things aren’t going right. Can you continue to retain your composure and your belief in things? That’s a challenge. If they’re not going right, they’re not going right. There was a lot of balls bouncing around that ended up in Monaghan hands today. We wish them all the best.”
