By Shaun Casey

MONAGHAN were relegated from Division One in the league but will have to put that behind them now as they prepare to face old foes Cavan in the opening round of the Ulster Championship.

Injuries to key men such as Ryan McAnespie, Conor McCarthy and Killian Lavelle hindered their chances of survival in the top tier, but manager Gabriel Bannigan is hoping he can call on some of the injured party in a few weeks’ time at Clones.

The Farney men are chasing a first Anglo Celt since 2015, and a win over Cavan in the quarter-final will see them progress to the last four where the winners of Derry and Antrim stand between them and the provincial showpiece.

“I’m certainly hoping that those boys will be available to me for inclusion in the squad. Genuinely, will they be ready for 75 or 80 minutes of championship football in three weeks’ time? I don’t think so,” said the Monaghan boss.

“That’s being honest about it and they couldn’t be because they’ve missed the entire league so they just couldn’t be up to match readiness or championship readiness in terms of full games.

“But it would be fantastic to have them back in the squad to have them available for some part of the game, and I am hoping that some of them will be. There’s plenty of them injured at the moment and have missed the latter stages of the league.

“Throw in Dylan Byrne who missed the whole league bar one game, Louis Kelly, Bobby McCaul missed it all. Gary Mohan missed half of it and I’m probably leaving out a couple there as well so there’s plenty of them.”

One man that certainly won’t feature in the Ulster Championship, or possibly further afield, is Emyvale attacker Michael Hamill, who is still sidelined with a knee injury picked up in last year’s Division Two league campaign.

“Michael Hamill won’t be back for the start of the championship. He had a very nasty injury in the league last year and it was worse than a cruciate, that’s the best way I could describe it. He did everything that you could do in his knee.

“It’s a long rehab for Michael. His attitude is brilliant, but he won’t be ready for the first round of the championship. We’d be hoping he might be back in some capacity for the All-Ireland series but even if we progress in the Ulster Championship, he won’t be back for a while.”

Bannigan and his Monaghan charges were bitterly disappointed to drop out of the top tier, having lost all seven of their games, but they can take some positives heading into the business end of the season.

“The overriding comment would be one of disappointment because we lost our Division One status having fought so hard to get it back,” said the Aughnamullen clubman, now in his second season in charge of his native county.

“We’re obviously very disappointed to have not won a game and that does put us under a wee bit of pressure in terms of putting that right now in the championship.

“There were positives. Division One is not a place to be experimenting too much but we had to experiment a lot. We handed out 16 debuts, and we had a mixed bag in terms of performances.”

Looking back across all the games, Bannigan continued, “We had a number of good performances. We outplayed Dublin for an hour in Croke Park, and we left six goals chances behind us, we should have been winning that game.

“We outplayed Donegal for a fair bit of the game a couple of weeks ago and we were disappointed to come out the wrong side of that, and we saw what Donegal did in Croke Park last Sunday.

“We played very well against Galway in Inniskeen, but we were terrible in the first half. We played very well against Kerry for 55 minutes down in Killarney, a really spirited performance.

“We played some great football over in the Hyde (Dr Hyde Park) against Roscommon, but we coughed up a couple of bad goals, and we had a goal of their own disallowed that probably shouldn’t have been. The first day out against Armagh, we were very poor.

“It was a mixed bag in terms of performances but you’re going to get that when you are missing as many players as we were and experimenting as much as we did.

“The squad is in a better place now. We’re very happy with the work we’re doing at the moment, and we will be hopeful that we’ll have a number of players back in championship squads that we didn’t see in any of the league squads.”