McArdle: Scotstown have reset since historic Ulster success

By Shaun Casey

THE historic achievements of 2025 have been put to the back of Scotstown’s mind as their drilling into the business end of the season, says captain Damien McArdle.

David McCague’s side ended a long 36-year wait for an Ulster Club Championship title last December but are now focusing on retaining their Monaghan title before turning their attentions towards the provincial scene once again.

The An Bhoth men have already won the league in Monaghan, beating Latton in the Division One final, and they face the same opponents now on Sunday in their second championship outing.

“There’s a bigger target maybe on our backs now and different teams will be focusing more on us, McArdle said. “For ourselves, it’s more about parking it, resetting and regrouping. We’re just going again and treating it like a brand-new year.”

Scotstown, who are chasing a fourth county title in a row and an 11th in 14 seasons, got their title defence up and running with a nine-point win over Carrickmacross before enjoying a bye in round two.

“It’s one weekend on and one weekend off in Monaghan so that suits perfectly,” the Scotstown defender continued. “We probably got the bye weekend just at a really good time.”

“We’ve only played Carrick so far and we had last weekend off. We just trained as usual and dived into our first performance of the championship to see where we can improve on it and what we can address.

“We got a good start in the first 10 or 15 minutes. Then, it was really just a matter of managing the game after that. We were in strong control of the game early on so we could just see it out after that.”

Turning his gaze to Latton, McArdle and his teammates are expecting Terence Reynolds’ men to come out swinging as they lost to Carrickmacross last weekend, having also tasted defeat in the opening round to last year’s beaten county finalists Inniskeen.

“They played Carrick last week and they lost so they’ll be coming to us and they’ll be hungry but we’ll to have to concentrate on ourselves and try to produce a performance,” added McArdle.

“It’s all about momentum and peaking at the right time at this stage of the season. One or two bad days and you could be caught so you just need to focus on yourself and get the performance right.”