On one of the in-between days around Christmas, Conor McManus got out of the house and went for a walk around the roads in Clontibret. He didn’t go for long – maybe 20 minutes, half an hour. A few kilometres was all he covered. Even so, he had to reach into his pocket after a while and take out his phone.
“I had to ring a friend of mine to come and lift me,” he says. “The pain in my hips was so bad that I knew I wouldn’t be able to make it back to the house. And that’s been going on a couple of years now. So like, where would you be going trying to compete in intercounty football when you can’t even go for walks?
“The well was dry. That was just basically it. I walk with a limp most of the time and have been for a couple of years. It’s just that I’ve managed to walk in a certain way that maybe you wouldn’t notice it. But if you were looking at me getting out of the car, for the first 15 or 20 steps I’d definitely be limping.”
And so he called time. After 18 seasons, after 202 matches, after 25-708 in brackets beside his name. After 9-291 scored in 77 championship games, leaving him fourth on the all-time list behind Cillian O’Connor, Colm Cooper and Dean Rock. After three All Stars, two Ulster titles and one stint as captain of the Ireland International Rules team, he retired as one of the modern greats of the game.
[ Magical Conor McManus leaves Monaghan a legacy that will never be forgottenOpens in new window ]
McManus, who will be writing for The Irish Times during this summer’s championship, did of course finish up as Monaghan’s leading scorer of all time. Not only was he the first Monaghan player to pass 300 points in the championship, he’s the only one to pass 200. Before there was Conor McManus, there was Paul Finlay (0-151) and there was Tommy Freeman (9-101). McManus scored more for Monaghan than both of them combined.
Given that he can’t walk the backroads of his parish without needing to dial up a rescue car, it might be a little more surprising to find out that he also retired as his county’s most-capped player. McManus’s 77 championship outings across 18 campaigns leave him 11 clear of Darren Hughes. Between 2007 and 2023, he started 62 consecutive championship matches. All the while – and particularly since the late-2010s – his hips were screaming at him to find a less taxing hobby.
“It became more difficult to do it. I was spending more and more time in the gym, more and more time on the bike, more and more time doing straight-line running up and down the side of the field when the boys were training. That’s going on for five years now. Mentally, it was a bit of a drag for a couple of years there because you couldn’t actually do the bit that you love doing. Training and playing is ultimately why you’re doing it. That’s what you enjoy.
“Even from a purely practising point of view, parts of that would have been neglected over the past few years. When I was younger, I’d have been doing a lot of practice and a lot of free-taking on top of training. Whereas the last four or five years, that nearly just went out the window. Because when you had your session over, the last thing your hip needed was going kicking 30, 40, 50 more balls.
“So for the last few years, as soon as a session was over, I was straight into the ice bath. As quick as my legs would get me in there, that’s where I was going. Whereas beforehand, you’d have been out practising, taking penalties, honing your skills. But that all came to an end because I just physically couldn’t do it. And again, that takes a bit of enjoyment out of the whole thing.”
He’d do it again, though. Wouldn’t think twice about it. When he joined the Monaghan panel in 2007, nobody was predicting great things for him or for any of them. This weekend 18 years ago, they were playing London in Division 2A. During that campaign, he played for the under-21s on a Saturday before heading off to play Leitrim in Clune on the Sunday. No part of that sentence would make sense today.
He was in Navan last weekend to see his old team run riot against a Meath side that had been highly-touted beforehand. For so many of his old compadres, this is a first ever Division Two campaign – and it’s showing. They’re the highest scorers in the country and Meath weren’t able to live with their pace and dynamism. Monaghan teams expect to be in the top flight now, or to return quickly when they drop down. McManus’s generation did that.
“We got there by taking very small steps. Let’s start by winning our home games. Let’s start winning back-to-back league games. Let’s start winning games away from home. Let’s win a game in Croke Park. And then at the end of the year you looked back and you could see all these green ticks on the wall, steps you had taken along the way.
“That all fed into the mentality of where you should be, getting used to it being where you belong. We built all those blocks over a three-, four-, five-year period. Being in Division One was key to it as well.
“I’ve said before, we didn’t convert all those years into trophies. We left Ulster championships behind us, there’s no doubt about that. We left All-Ireland semi-finals behind us. But you were in the conversation every year. That’s where you felt you needed to be and where you belonged. That took a lot of work. It took a career’s work really.”
[ Time to revisit proposal to scrap football league finalsOpens in new window ]
He played in two All-Ireland semi-finals. In both of them, Monaghan were level or leading in the last 10 minutes. But Tyrone saw them off the premises in 2018 and the Dubs blitzed them as the clock ran down in 2023. Of the two, it’s the Tyrone one that sticks in McManus’s craw still.
“We were definitely good enough to win that one,” he says. “We didn’t and that’s a cross we have to carry. That was a sickener. Now, it would have been a big challenge for us to beat that particular Dublin team at that particular time. They were going for four in a row at that stage.
“But to put ourselves there on that day and to be the ones asking the question of Dublin that day, I think that team – you can’t say you deserved it because you don’t. You have to go and take it. Nobody hands you anything. You don’t deserve anything. You go and you take it and we didn’t go and take it. That’s the bottom line. So that one stings.”
His body being in the shape it is, he has taken to civilian life quite easily. When The Irish Times tells him that the last three occupants of the Tuesday football column are all back in the intercounty scene, he laughs darkly and says there is zero chance of him following Michael Murphy back into the trenches. He goes to games now and enjoys looking at an entirely different scene than the one he left behind. The new rules have changed everything.
“You’re watching games now and you’re going, ‘How did we do that for so long?’ But that’s what the game was. And as a player, you don’t really give a damn what it looks like because you’re so invested in it. But even last year in the league when you’d be watching on from the bench or not togged out for a couple of games, you’d be watching and it was just so boring. But it’s not boring now as a spectator.
“The games are good, there’s action, the crowd are engaged. It’s quick, it’s fast. The pace of that game the other day in Navan – in the middle eight, it’s just go, go, go all the time. There’s no room for a breather. Even when there’s a free, nobody stops. If a player is fouled, he just gets up and goes again.
“The quality is showing so much more. Players have been so well coached that they’re just flourishing now. There’s been so much work done in trying to manipulate space and find space where there was no space that now that there is space, these top players are nearly unmarked. They’ve been so adept at making it work where there was no space that now that they’re just finding it so much easier.”
That said, he doesn’t necessarily swing with all the new rules. If it was up to him, the kick-out would go back to the small arc. The other changes have done enough to free up the game without every kickout having to land in the midfield jungle. But these things will iron themselves out in time. For now, it’s up to everybody to adapt or die.
“There is no Dublin of 10 years ago. It’s far more even now. Anybody can beat anybody on any day. I think the interesting team is Galway. They can defend zonally in a way that everyone else is having to try and learn from scratch, purely because they were already doing it.
“If you watched them last year, they were the only team that left three men up more often than not. So they are used to defending with 11 players back – and now that there’s no goalies coming at them on an overlap, I think they’re probably a step ahead in that regard.”
A step ahead is where McManus lived for so long. Limp or no limp, he’ll try to keep it that way.
♦ Conor McManus will be appearing in The Irish Times every Tuesday during Championship 2025
