Injury time in Gaa is some joke. keeper down for 3 minutes alone, never mind all the other stoppages. then a free just at the end of normal time and a player down for a minute, and another free in injury time them wastes another minute. they need proper time keeping, joke as it is
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That was surely a point at the end… Disgraceful carry on.
Absolutely.
Worrying for Monaghan going forward that Donegal got within a point. They should have had that game out of sight long before it was over.
Definitely, they all knew it was wide.
Simply don’t have the forwards. An achievement by McManus to achieve what he does and the team in general, shows the worth of the Provincials still at least.
Was in it’s hole. McBrearty himself grabbed his head in his hands when he saw it go wide.
Don’t you start I’m in no fucking humour.
The provincial system vindicated yet again. Best system in Gaelic football anywhere in the world.
Scotstown will be rocking tonight. 
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Look mate, why are we, two proud Munster hurling men, even arguing over a score in a fucking Ulster football match. We’d want to cop ourselves on.
Jesus, you’re right, sorry, pal.
Ulster football final day in Clones > Munster hurling final day in Thurles.
Monaghan were gassed for the last ten minutes of that. Clearly the better team for most of the match but lucky to hang on all the same. They’re probably better than they were two years ago but it’s still doubtful whether they’d have enough to live with Kerry in a semi-final.
Repeats of three of the quarter-finals of 2013 lined up now.
Kerry v Fermanagh/Westmeath
Monaghan v Tyrone/Sligo
Mayo v Donegal/Galway
Dublin v Cork/Kildare
Thrilling finale and gripping match. I thought Monaghan were deserved winners despite Donegal’s profligacy. That said, I feared Monaghan would live to regret Dessie Mone’s missed chance at 11-7, not to mention McManus hitting the post at 11-10.
I don’t think Michael Murphy was injured - he was just shackled tremendously all over the field by Vinny Corey who’s been an excellent and versatile inter county defender for over a decade.
Monaghan played some smashing stuff in the last 25 minutes of the first half. Patient, probing, intelligent and a string of superb points.
Other miscellaneous observations:
- Karl O’Connell rivals Jack McCaffrey for pace.
- Colin Walshe is a quality man-marker.
- It’s quite interesting being at these games to see the teams transition into their defensive shapes so quickly when they lose the ball. Both sides pretty much lined 5 players across their own 45, with 2 free men behind that protecting the 2 man markers. No point lorrying the ball forward into that or running aimlessly into it.
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Clones genetically immune to replication
Sat, Jun 19, 2004
Sideline Cut: Not so long ago, the Ulster football championship was regarded as the dark angel of Gaelic games. It was stark and unlovely and elemental and explainable to outsiders only by the fact that it happened “up there”.
Generations of Sunday Game panellists reviewed the offerings from Ulster with the contempt a gourmet critic might evince if asked to ponder something as basic as, well, an Ulster fry, the colloquial “heart attack on a plate”.
Over the years, the famously avant-garde Sunday Game wardrobe - never afraid to present its GAA men in blossom pink - went through its various colour evolution but the attitude towards Ulster stayed the same. It was a kind of Dante’s Inferno of pulling, pushing, heaving, spitting, cursing, raining, thumping, kicking, jeering, booing and busting. And that was just trying to get through the turnstiles. The Ulster championship was angry about football just as certain men were terminally and unalterably angry about life. Certain truisms about the Ulster scene became distilled over the years into reliable old chestnuts. Not for the Faint-hearted. An Impossible Task. Getting out of Control. Off the Ball. Deserved to Go. A Poor Game. Not Taking any Prisoners. Bitter Rivalry. Clones.
Dear old Clones. Love it or hate it, there is no Gaelic football town even remotely like it. During the Troubles, a local famously declared: “They say it’s not as bad as they say it is.” That was how I always felt about the Ulster game.
Even before the Ulster renaissance in the 1990s, there was something rare and exciting and unique about the feeling around Clones on a big match day. Although much has been said and written about the complexity of the Ulster character, a good grounding for any novice would be to walk around Clones in the hours before an Ulster derby.
Clones is a market town living with distant memories of a time when it was a prosperous and important centre of the mid-Ulster landscape. Its square and the stately official buildings now owned by financial institutions give it a presence but the narrow main streets have a washed-out look, as if the last few decades had peeled away the shine. In the mid-1980s, Clones became associated with its most famous sporting son, Barry McGuigan.
A decade later, a kind of glorious infamy was bestowed upon the town through the literature of Pat McCabe, when its streets became the playground for the adventures of the preposterous Francie Brady in The Butcher Boy. That Neil Jordan’s film treatment of the cult novel was located in the actual town just confirmed that although it might have been possible to find other towns that looked like Clones, nowhere else felt like Clones. The weeks of that film added a bit of extra colour and money to the town because for most weeks of the year, as one local admitted passionately this week, the place has nothing.
After the 1999 final, a local woman who served up sandwiches and iced buns and tea to the hacks that used to write up game reports in the Agricultural Centre near St Tiernach’s Park said the very same thing. Clones is extreme about weather: it is either glorious or a malevolent monsoon. This evening was beautiful: the sky was salmon-streaked and Armagh had beaten Down and the chip vans down the town were booming out dance music. Boys in replica jerseys and girls dolled up to the hilt were drinking bottles near the buses that were rumbling in neutral, waiting to depart. A colleague was explaining to the woman that the noise and the boozing and the general Ulsterness of Clones made him wish he never had to see the place again. And she gently protested that the Ulster final was the town’s one big day out and if that was taken away, they would have nothing.
I think for local business people in Clones, the big football days - as well as providing dramatically increased revenues - are a throwback to grander days. By noon, the Creighton Hotel at the bottom of the hill looks like the home of a particularly wild wedding and the two main streets that run at right angles are crowded with people, like Pamplona during the running of the bulls. But if any right-minded bull encountered the crowds hanging outside the Bursted Sofa, he would turn back.
Fans coming in from the Cavan or Enniskillen roads leave their cars outside the town so everybody ends up walking everywhere. For an hour before the game, there is a constant procession up the steep hill towards the ground. Because of the location of the ground, the noise carries throughout the town. When the game ends, Clones is bedlam for an hour or two but by eight in the evening the place is just abandoned. There is an eerie feeling in the evening after an Ulster final day, when Clones is left to its memories.
Not long ago, the notion of an Ulster final in Croke Park would have been outlandish. It is a reflection of the healthy state of the local game that it is now regarded as having mass appeal for neutrals. For the teams involved - and the announcement all but trumpeted the final as the latest instalment of the Armagh-Tyrone rivalry - it possibly heightens the sense of occasion.
I don’t know, though. The Ulster Council has a right to hold its football finals where it pleases: there is no obligation to Clones. And it makes commercial sense for the GAA to fill Croke Park as often as possible. Yet the Ulster final belongs in Clones. When John Ford was making his great westerns, he didn’t go scouting for locations in New York. Clones has become the natural landscape for the Ulster game, with its attendant passions and controversies.
Back when the Ulster championship was an entity locked into itself, fiercely parochial and too self-obsessed to make much of an impression on a national scale, Clones loved it and needed it. That was why there was such an outcry during the week from the business communities whose premises and streets are going to be hauntingly quiet on Ulster final day this year.
Clones has no leasehold on the Ulster final and it could be argued that its townspeople have been fortunate to benefit from the crowds it brings in each summer. But what it has established through its association with the Ulster game is something that runs deeper: tradition.
The most common complaint about this country is that the authentic was washed away by the flood of wealth. Clones on an Ulster final day was the definition of authenticity. Nothing ever changed except the date and the teams. The setting was reassuringly familiar and content to let its visitors do whatever they would in the atmosphere of crumbling splendour.
The time will undoubtedly come when Ulster’s pre-eminence is in retreat and summer football again becomes a metaphor for the complexities of local feeling. But for this year anyway, it is going all grand and la-di-da in Croke Park.
There is no real lasting harm: it will still be a provincial final and maybe even a great one. But it won’t be an Ulster final, not in its soul.
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Keith Duggan
Sat, Jul 19, 2014,
Is the GAA seriously about to end the tradition of Ulster final day in Clones? Say it ain’t so, Joe. To do so would be madness.
Yes, the logic of moving Ulster’s big football day to its main city of Belfast is unimpeachable. When HRH, no less, takes 60 million sterling from her handbag for the purpose of redeveloping Casement Park, the gentlemen of the Ulster Council are not going to say no. That’s a lot of Friday bingo nights.
Word is that the new place in Andy’town will be a model of modernity and spatial planning and sightlines. The plans look wonderful. When its first big championship day rolls around in 2016, Ministers from Both Sides will sit together in the Ard Comhairle, smiling and remarking upon how far they have all travelled.
The GAA will sportingly provide guests of Unionist persuasion with the cricket updates from Trent Bridge or Headingley. It will be a good day for Ulster.
Belfast is a brilliant city. It makes sense to have the province’s main GAA theatre there. The redevelopment gives Ulster a stadium to compare with the best of those to be found ‘down South’. And those bragging rights matter in the GAA. There will be none of the traffic nightmares experienced in the narrow laneways around St Tiernach’s Park.
Casement Park can accommodate more supporters. The press facilities have everything its members could need, even electrical sockets. It’s a great leap forward. Moving from a backwater to the bright lights. It’s progress!
But so what? It’s still not Clones. Clones on Ulster final day is perfection and you shouldn’t tamper with that.
Now, it’s true that Clones on Ulster final day boasts an unrefined kind of perfection. It’s true, for instance, that the entrepreneurs of the culinary roadside emporiums have a fondness for country ballads played at full volume or the kind of lost classics that never made it out of the early 1990s. In Clones, the Prodigy will always be in the charts.
And there is no denying that you will encounter the full spectrum of booziness by takin’ a dander down Main Street, from the buckleppers who had a brave lock in the Hibernian to the few unfortunates whose day is done before the minor match. Stocious. Blitzed. Buckled. Bananaboats. Calved. Wrote off, hey.
It’s true too that the pleasantries are exchanged in a coda that the CIA would find tough to crack. “Go on ye wee get ye.” “I near forgot the wain.” “Is that you?” “Bout ye, big mon.” “Some day, hey”. “Wild hey. “Sure it was bucketin’ there comin thru Lisnaskea.” “Fierce walk in.” “Some handlin’.” “I near calved.”
Nor can you quite get over the disconcerting level of glamour which characterises Ulster final day.
If many supporters dress as if they are intent on going straight from the match to the dance floor in Kelly’s of Portrush, that’s because they are. And yes, Paulo Tullio and the other critics from the Restaurant might be sparing in their awarding of gold stars if they found themselves in Clones on Ulster final day and stopped at one of the culinary stalls on the way up to the Park.
In fact, they might be a little taken aback by the level of clousterin’ in general. Unless, of course, they had stood outside the Creighton Arms for a few noontime nerve settlers and fell in with the Scotstown crowd or the Kilmacrennan boys and had a right few. Then those quarter -pounders dripping with onions would taste like heaven.
Yes, it has been recently observed that Ulster’s somewhat problematic relationship with flags and marches can sometimes extend to the pre-match parade in Clones. Pace is everything: the slow-march and jubilant notes of the brass band somehow elevate the anticipation to boiling point. Maybe it would be better just to stick Set Guitars To Kill on the tannoy and let the players mosh in front of the Ard Comhairle for five minutes: just get it all out of their systems. But no: Clones is about nothing if not ceremony and tradition.
Think of any of the great stadiums of the world. Fenway Park in Boston. Anfield in Liverpool. The Olympiastadion in Berlin. Rio’s Maracana is a splendour to behold – or so I’m told.
All of those places have decades and stories behind them. That’s what makes them special. St Tiernach’s Park has that. It’s a great old stadium that just happens to be perched on a height over one of the Ulster’s most haughty and careworn towns. Clones is to Ulster what Ava Gardner was to Old Hollywood.
It helps, of course, that Clones is the home town of Patrick McCabe, who is probably the square root of modern Irish literature. It helps that he gave Clones the immortal Francie Brady, who put the town on the map and wouldn’t have been arsed with the Ulster final.
On days like tomorrow, when the senior match throws in a four pm, Clones reaches a crescendo at around 2. 42pm. St Tiernach’s Park is already busy but there is still a good crowd down the town and the hill leading up to the turnstiles is jammers.
Everyone knows that they need to get moving but they want to hang on, to stretch the day out. Because the anticipation of the match is the high point: no county has yet lost. Then, all of a sudden, 5,000 people decide to leave at once and it is bedlam. Sometimes people duck in to use the loos in the Creighton and aren’t seen again until Christmas. It is that kind of day.
There have been some great and some terrible finals there down the years. But the day is about more than the game.
It is fitting, now, that the last scheduled Ulster finals coincide with a renaissance in the fortunes of Monaghan football. They might even squeeze in a three-in-a-row before Ulster final day goes the same way as the Railway and the Luxor cinema and the other Clones landmarks.
Its days are numbered unless the GAA issues a reprieve. They could at least split the finals, with Clones hosting every other year. I’m all for the whales. But let’s save Clones too. They won’t know what they lost until they have lost it.
And it is a fleeting magic. By the time we leave the press box in the evening time, the Anglo Celt Cup has long been lifted and laid. The dressing rooms are closed, the stadium ghostly and the serenity and sense of desertion about the town is hard to fathom given the noontime scenes.
You could go on about Clones forever. But a friend put it perfectly in an email not so long ago explaining what he feels sets Clones apart on Ulster final day.
“It’s one of my favourite places on earth, like an Ireland that no longer exists and somehow for one day in the year appears shimmering from the mist like Hy-Brasil.”
I’ve said it before, redeveloping Casement is a pointless ego exercise. Clones is the spiritual home of Ulster football. I’d hate to see it lose Ulster finals.
I plotted a route back south post game in double quick time yesterday via Roslea in Fermanagh before rejoining the Clones-Monaghan road just outside Monaghan town. There seems to be loads of secret little roads and lanes around Clones to escape away and avoid the traffic. I got a bit nervous before the motorway after Ardee and refused to drive any more. I also got a sunburned forehead standing on the Hill. It was a very enjoyable occasion - my second favourite trip to Clones after Wexford’s qualifier win in 2006.
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How would you compare it to Thurles? Personally I think Clones has a much superior atmosphere in both the town and the stadium and is my favourite provincial venue, just ahead of Killarney.
There’s always a real air of twee self congratulation in the air in Thurles, summed up by Anthony Daly’s anecdote last week about him slapping Joe McKenna on the thigh as the band walked around, which isn’t there in Clones. Ulster final day in Clones is raw and uncouth and that’s why it’s great.
I would rank my favourite GAA venues as follows:
- Clones
- Killarney
- Pairc Ui Chaoimh
- Athletic Grounds, Armagh
- Newbridge
- Gaelic Grounds, Limerick
- Cusack Park, Ennis
- Semple Stadium
- Wexford Park
- Nowlan Park
I know I’ll most likely regret this, but fuck sake Sid, what on earth is good about Newbridge.