Former Monaghan manager Seamus McEnaney has revealed that he talked his fuming players out of going ‘on strike’ when he wasn’t reappointed for 2011.
‘Banty’ had overseen the rejuvenation of Monaghan between 2005 and 2010, taking them to two Ulster finals and to Division 1 of the league.
But he said he felt let down by the county board who eventually rubber stamped Eamonn McEneaney’s appointment, describing this as his ‘greatest regret’ in football.
The Corduff man ended up taking over Meath weeks later but said this was a ‘knee-jerk reaction out of what happened in Monaghan’.
Speaking on The Farney Army Pod, Banty revealed that then captain and future manager Vinny Corey was among those ready to take to the picket lines.
“I had to go to the players to tell them not to go on strike at the time,” said McEnaney. “I was desperately disappointed how I was handled. I felt we could get over the line.
“Yes, the Ulster final didn’t go well for us but I was bitterly disappointed the chairman and secretary at that time refused to give me another year.
“It was one of the most bitter pills in my career of football to swallow. If I have regrets in football, not being reappointed in 2010 was my greatest regret.”
Under new manager Eamonn McEneaney, Monaghan suffered back-to-back relegations to Division in 2011 and 2012, slipping to Division 3, and lost four of their five Championship games.
“Don’t forget, my captain at the time was Vinny Corey,” said Banty. “Now you’d go to war with Vinny Corey any day of the week. He was militant in relation to the direction that we wanted to go and he was not taking that too kindly what was happening.
“I’m truthful, I had to go to him in the end and say, ‘Listen, Vinny, what’s best for Monaghan football is that the Monaghan footballers play for Monaghan’.
“Maybe we wouldn’t have won Ulster titles in 2013 and 2015 if I’d stayed on another year. But two years later we ended up in Division 3 and we disassembled a really good group of players.”
McEnaney returned for a second stint as Monaghan manager between 2020 and 2022. Standards at that stage were a lot higher than they’d been when he first inherited a Monaghan panel in late 2004.
He said there was a ‘huge culture problem’ at the time and revealed: “I seen some of the Monaghan players being picked up at the Hillgrove in Monaghan on their way home from nightclubs to go to play games for Monaghan.”
As for the group he inherited in Meath, that wasn’t what he expected either.
“I looked in thinking they were huge men, tradition, were brave as lions,” said McEnaney. “(In reality) it was everything I didn’t expect. I could go into the Monaghan dressing-room and I could pick three or four fellas to do man-marking jobs that would be tough and nasty. This wasn’t the case in Meath.
“Mickey Burke was one man you could send to do a job. In relation to being tough, hard, tenacious, like the team of the ‘90s, I don’t like to be criticising, but the reality was that this wasn’t the case.”
McEnaney also revealed in the podcast interview that he tried to get former Galway and Mayo stars Padraic Joyce and Ciaran McDonald to play for Monaghan in the 2000s.
“At the end of 2007, I remember I felt we needed a centre-forward,” he said. “I went looking for Padraic Joyce, believe it or not, because he was married to a Monaghan woman. You know what, and this is a secret out of school, he would have come to me but he wanted to play with his club so he couldn’t come to Monaghan because he was a Galway man and not...he had to play club football in Monaghan. He wouldn’t leave his own club, which you have to respect him for.
“The other man I tried for in 2008, I met him twice and he wouldn’t come, was Ciaran McDonald. He was working in Navan. Those are two secrets that never came out. Again, he wouldn’t shift. I felt if we had one man who could control the forward unit in ‘07, ‘08, ‘09 and ‘10, from centre-forward, that would have been the link in the chain.”
* The full interview with Seamus McEnaney on The Farney Army Pod is available on Spotify.