By Niall Gartland

STANDING in Monaghan’s way of a place in the Lory Meagher Cup final are a New York team that has yet to play a game in the competition, an “absolute joke” on two fronts according to Farney boss Arthur Hughes.

The Monaghan Hurlers have battled their way through five group stage matches to get to this point, squeezing into the semi-finals by virtue of last weekend’s drawn encounter with Longford, for whom a win would’ve seen them advance at the Farney’s expense.

Monaghan and New York will duke it out in a semi-final clash this Saturday at TEG Cusack Park in Mullingar following a Congress-endorsed decision to parachute New York into the knock-out rounds of the competition.

Their very inclusion is a source of discomfort as they can call upon a host of players from the traditional hurling powers, and making matters worse is the fact they didn’t have to field in the group stages.

Monaghan manager Arthur Hughes said: “I think it’s an absolute disgrace. It’s not that long ago the GAA were trying to get rid of five counties in Ireland from playing in the National League, and now the next thing they’ve done is bringing in New York.

“It’s an absolute joke in my opinion – you don’t know what you’re coming up against, what level they’re at, and it’s completely unfair to just fly a team into the semi-finals. If you’re going to participate in a competition, you should be there from the start.”

“Jarlath Burns is in as President now and hopefully does a good job but I’ve no time for Larry McCarthy and what he’s tried to push through.”

While Monaghan are rank outsiders to get anything out of their impending semi-final clash, they’ve nonetheless done extremely well to get to this point, particularly after a disappointing league campaign which saw them finish bottom of Division Four.

“In the league campaign we’d a lot of men injured if truth be told, it just seemed to go from one injury to another. We never got a full team out on the field, and we probably still haven’t the full contingent, but we’ve a bit more depth to our squad now, and we’ve been happy with our effort

“We won our first Lory Meagher against Leitrim, though we didn’t play that well against Cavan, they’ve probably been the best team in it. But after that we beat Lancashire and that left it all to play for against Longford. At spells we were in trouble, we didn’t seem to be clicking right. They turned the screw in the third-quarter but we didn’t let them away completely and we got goals at the right time and just about hung on at the end. There wasn’t much in it and we just came out on the right side of it.”