I thought he announced his retirement a year or two ago already?
Nearly sure I remember watching tg4 GAA highlights show about 17 years ago and he was unplayable for his club in a county final.
Anyone able to share Mcmanus article with Declan bouge ?
Declan Bogue
IT STARTED BY the side of the house.
There was something of a mini-football field by one gable of Frank and Mary McManus’s house in Clontibret. The girls, Laura and Cathy, would kick some ball there.
In time, both girls would play for O’Neill’s Shamrocks. Frank was the manager. They won an Ulster junior championship one year and the following year were beaten in the Ulster intermediate final.
Alongside Frank, carrying the water, lifting the cones, was his only son, Conor. He loved football. He spent hour upon hour in the cold, in the wet, in the wind, kicking balls over the goals, with Frank kicking them back out, avoiding the droppings of the four sheep they kept.
All that deliberate practice helped Conor. But still, he was light. Almost frail. A really good club player, but not quite good enough to make the Monaghan minor panel.
The year after, he was starting for the Monaghan senior team. Seamus McEnaney saw enough of him to play him at wing-back.
For the next 18 seasons, he morphed from attacking wing-back to one of the greatest inside forwards the game has seen. From a waif to a bulging bicep athlete. From an innocent to the clutch score-getter of his generation.
IMAGE: John McVitty / INPHO
All along the way, through the Ulster titles, the All-Stars, the International Rules tours, the defeats and the agonies, Frank and Mary, Laura and Cathy, would team up with parents and siblings of other players.
If Monaghan were playing Kerry on a Sunday, they would be in Killarney or Tralee by the Friday, taking in the sights, heading out to seek out the craic.
And then it ended.
It ended in the house of Sam Baida, the Monaghan physio.
For weeks, months, years, McManus had been trying to coax a bit more out of his arthritic hip. He had been managing it since an operation in 2011. But even going for a walk around the country roads was proving agonising.
Baida confirmed that the hip had significantly deteriorated from the year before, when it was already in very poor condition.
And that’s how it ends. In the near future he will be getting a hip replacement. He will play for Clontibret O’Neills and see what he can manage that way. He marries his partner, Hannah Gallagher, later this year.
He has his work as an auctioneer, with Sherry FitzGerald wise enough to add Conor McManus to their Monaghan town branch. And no doubt, he will heading for a pundit’s chair soon.
He takes a pause. Time unspools. He considers the next act.
But first, a quick look back.
Declan Bogue: The first thing people might consider about your retirement is the timing. Why did it come so close to the start of the league?
Conor McManus: I wanted to play for Monaghan.
You didn’t know where you were at. I suppose in the last two years, I probably showed myself what I could get out of it, even the hip being the way it is. That’s why the decision took as long as it did this year.
I gave it every chance and I wanted to make the call before the league started. I didn’t want it to be… someone might even say it was too close to the start of the league.
DB: By any measure, 18 years of your life is an extraordinarily long time to be playing a punishing sport such as Gaelic football.
CMcM: You are never thinking long term like that. You are not thinking if you are going to be able to play when you are 36, 37. You are thinking of that league, that season, how can you improve?
And that came at the end of every year, you wanted to get better and what you could do to get better.
I wasn’t as physically developed at that stage to go and play in the inside line. It (wing-back) was a good place for me to start my career. I got an idea as to how the game was played and get a feel for the thing.
As I got physically stronger, I went to the inside line. I was in there by 2010 and myself and Tommy Freeman played in the inside line and we were beaten in the Ulster final by Tyrone. I never really came out of the full-forward line after that.
You were never thinking of having that kind of career and playing for that long. You were just focused on getting better in every year, every session. You were always driven to be as good as you could be.
DB: This might say more about me than anything else, but you started off very slight, and finished extremely strong yet very lean. What weight are you?
CMcC: I’m 13-and-a-half stone. When I was starting out, looking at some of the photos of myself, I must have been eight stone!
DB: And because of that, some defenders always felt they could rough you up. Where did the mental strength come from to put up with the treatment you got?
CMcC: Any of the times that players were digging or mouthing at you, the only reason they were doing it was to get your off your game or pull you into something that you didn’t want to be, and you are no good to the team if you respond or react.
Playing in the full-forward line in the 10 or 15 years I was playing, it was probably as defensive an era as there ever was.
But you always had to have it in your head that your chance would come. Your time would come. And that was the only way to hurt a team: get a score, win a free, get a goal, whatever it is, setting up a score — and you had to latch on to that belief.
‘Yes, I might be kept quiet here for half an hour, or 40 minutes, but this thing is going to open up. There’s going to come a chance, an opportunity and I have to be ready. I have to be there when the time comes.’
The physical side of things never bothered me at all. You relished the physical side of things. That’s the bit that challenges you, that’s the bit that you go to the gym for, to mix it in the physical battles.
Being slight and being small, I always had it in my head that it is well know I didn’t make it with the county minors with Monaghan. I was small and slight, but I had it in my head that I was never going to be beaten for physicality.
IMAGE: Cathal Noonan / INPHO
I might not look big, I might not be as big as some but I am never going to lie down in the face of that challenge. Maybe I just carried that wee bit of a chip on my shoulder the whole way through.
DB: You maxed out on your talents, which is a huge comfort to any player in retirement.
CMcC: I don’t look back with many regrets in that I have gone as hard as I could, for as long as I could.
Would I have liked to have gone and done another year with Monaghan? Yes. 100%. It wasn’t an easy decision.
In my heart I wanted to go again but my head and my body were telling me otherwise and eventually I had to listen to them, whereas I haven’t listened to them the last couple of years.
I would have loved nothing more to go another season, but I didn’t want to just be there. I think too much of Monaghan just to be in there for the sake of keeping in there.
DB: What were your personal highlights?
CMcC: Obviously, the two Ulster finals would be up there.
The first one (2013), Monaghan hadn’t won one in 25 years. We got to the final in 2014 and I was captain in ’14. In 2013 Eoin Lennon was captain and I was vice-captain. We lost in 2014 and didn’t play particularly well.
Teams were looking at you thinking, ‘Right, yous have won your Ulster final, now away you go.’
We went to Division 1 then and won the Ulster championship again in 2015. It was more of an air of satisfaction from the 2015 one, because we done it again and that was where we felt we belonged, competing at the back end of championships.
The disappointing element of that is we never got to an All-Ireland final. We never won an All-Ireland. You look at the teams we had, the players we had, they were definitely good enough to win All-Irelands there but it didn’t work out for us.
You will always have a tinge of regret, but that’s sport. We had some brilliant days and that was two of the better ones.
DB: The day you beat Armagh in Newry, the day after the death of Monaghan U20 captain Ógie Duffy in 2021, was phenomenal. I’ve never felt emotion in a crowd like it. You were miles ahead early on, nearly lost it, and you dragged Monaghan back into it with an exceptional last quarter.
CMcC: That day was incredibly tough for Monaghan and Monaghan people.
There were four or five lads in our dressing room that day who had played with Ógie the night before. When they came into the team meeting the next morning, they were crying. They didn’t know where to be, where to look, what to do. It was just so tough for them.
A lot of us boys wouldn’t have known Ógie overly well. We were looking forward to bringing him in to the squad and he would have been one of the players you were looking at to drive things on.
It was an incredibly tough time. Football was really quite insignificant going to the game. But that hour or two during the game, it became more than just a game of football. It elevated to something slightly more than that.
Even though at the end of the game, everyone had to deal with what was in front of them with Ógie’s death and how it happened, it just gave the people of Monaghan a bit of a lift, something to cling onto.
And then the manner of it added to it. In the first half, four goals, we looked like we were going to run away with it. And Armagh came back, looked like they had the game won and we managed to claw our way back out of nowhere.
That was a fairly special day. Definitely one of those ones you can look back on and glad to be part of.
We had black armbands on us going to the game as it was. Our sponsor had died the week before, Philip Treanor, and the black armbands took on a whole new meaning on top of Philip. It was a tough, tough, tough place to be.
DB: You seemed universally loved by followers of all counties, and you spent ages after every game giving time to children. Was there any part of that uncomfortable?
CMcC: I grew up watching football and loving football. Unfortunately, the footballers I was loving and watching were from Down and Derry, Donegal and Tyrone.
I was born in 1987, Monaghan were Ulster champions in ’88 and I knew nothing about it.
As a young lad growing up, you are drawn to success, not to losing in the first round of the Ulster championship more often than not.
And I was drawn to Mickey Linden and Peter Canavan. That we got to be in that realm of success with Monaghan and have young kids coming and looking for pictures or autographs after the games, you would absolutely never, in your wildest dreams turn anyone down.
Even still now, if I met the likes of Mickey Linden or Peter Canavan, you are still in awe.
I never took it for granted that kids were around you. It’s something that I would always count as a privilege, to be fit and healthy enough to play for Monaghan, to be good enough, and to have some kids looking up to you and wanted a jersey signed, a picture, it was a privileged position to be in.
IMAGE: Laszlo Geczo / INPHO
DB: Would you rather it had been someone else that Sean Cavanagh dragged down in the 2013 All-Ireland quarter-final, given that it became a moment of moral panic?
CMcC: Listen, I think it was Joe Brolly blew that up to be more than it was. It became synonymous with a rant on TV and I just happened to be the man who was pulled down.
It happened. I never paid too much heed to it, gave it weight or credence.
Would I rather not have been pulled down? Yes. I’d rather have had the chance to have a shot at goal or get a goal. Didn’t happen. Tyrone beat us and went through to the All-Ireland semi-final.
On that day if you were to look at it, we had chances to beat Tyrone that day and didn’t take them. It all came down to that one chance that I was pulled down for.
People would always bring it up and bounce it off you. It doesn’t annoy me too much that it was me.
DB: Who was the most difficult defender you encountered?
CMcC: I would see it as a question about the systems. This is why the new rules have come in.
The last seven, nine years, a tactic of most teams was to run you up the field. You had a decision to make.
Most management teams I was involved with, they are trying to get you to hand off the player to someone else and don’t follow him as they wanted to keep you as close to the goals as possible.
But the way the game evolved, over the last few years, it just went to a stage where you had no choice but to follow the runners.
That’s the system. You are not necessarily pitted against anyone for a one v one.
The defenders I would have found most difficult, I remember playing full-forward in the last game of the league in Killarney against Kerry and they were All-Ireland champions.
We needed some sort of a result to stay up and as it turns out, we did. But I was marking Marc Ó Sé. Tomás Ó Sé was starting his first game back, he had been out injured, and Paul Galvin was there.
They were ramping up towards a race at the All-Ireland, and I remember thinking coming off the field that day that was the level that All-Ireland champions operate at.
Marc Ó Sé was marking me. I was by no means a household name then and he marked me like I was Peter Canavan.
He was touch-tight, he was aggressive, he was nasty. He was everything you wanted in a corner back, and as well as that, he went up the field and kicked a point with his left foot.
I was only in my first year in the inside line, playing arguably the best defender in the game at the time, but I came away thinking I was a long way off that level I need to be at if I wanted to make any shape at playing county football.
Mick Fitzsimons was always a challenge too. Then you had the likes of Neil McGee who was tough as well. Deceptively fast. You had to be on your game to win a ball out in front of him. And then when you won it, you were faced with a very, very aggressive and powerful man.
DB: So what’s next for 2025?
CMcC: Playing with your club is very special as well for competitive action for that level and doing your best for the club is the aim for the year.
But getting involved in that environment, the elite level of sport is something I wouldn’t rule out. I am not actively looking for anything. But it would be something if the right opportunity came up down the line…
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By the sounds of Dessie tonight, Mick Fitz is sadly gone
Usual twee GGA fare here @Bandage
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Time to relax and spend his evenings smoking his collection of cigars made of David Clifford.
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