McManus: Fermanagh was always going to be my choice

CIAN McManus lives south of the border and was integral to St Pat’s, Cavan’s MacRory Cup success in 2015 – but he was only ever going to play intercounty football with Fermanagh.

McManus lives a few minutes away from the grounds at Teemore, where he plays his club football, and he says there was no chance he was ever going to line out for anyone else.

Family connections have always pulled him towards Teemore, even though he eschewed the option of heading to St Michael’s, Enniskillen like the majority of talented young players in the county.

It hasn’t hindered his intercounty career – he was drafted into the Fermanagh panel by Pete McGrath in 2016 just after he finished his leaving cert – and he wasn’t jealous either when Cavan won the Ulster Championship last year.

“I actually live on the Cavan side of the border in Ballyconnell – I regularly get told I’m a Mexican.

“My mother’s from Leitrim but my dad’s from Teemore – he played with Teemore, has been chairman and managed them so I was always going to play for them.

“I went to primary school in the South, and Cavan’s just as easy to get to as Enniskillen so I went to St Pat’s. It worked out well enough.”

He continued: “I’m friends with some boys on the Cavan team and I was happy for them when they won Ulster. They did it the hard way, and Jesus, I wasn’t expecting at the outset that they’d go on and win it.

“I’m lucky enough the pubs weren’t open at Christmas, I get abuse at the worst of times when Cavan aren’t going well so I can only imagine what it would’ve been like.”

McManus was a regular starter for Fermanagh in the half-back line when the action recommenced in the autumn last year, but he’d actually been intending on taking the year out only for Covid striking and scuppering those plans.

“I got called into the senior team during my leaving cert year and initially didn’t get involved because of exams. We got knocked out of the minor championship and Pete called me in during the summer.

“I was 18 then and have been on the panel since really. I left for a bit in 2019 after the league because I’d damaged my foot and wasn’t getting to play games.

“I was falling out of love with it and was going to go travelling but then Covid hit. I started loving football again and ‘Ricey’ (Ryan McMenamin) called me back in. I’d a solid enough championship with Teemore and ended up playing in the league and championship matches so I can’t complain.”

From the outside looking in, it appeared a major blow to Fermanagh’s chances in 2021 when news emerged that Ryan and Conall Jones and Tomas and Ruairi Corrigan had decided to leave the panel. McManus says it’s hard to gauge if it’s had any impact on morale as there is so little happening at the moment anyway.

“I can’t tell you what the mood is like in the camp because there’s been no collective training. You can only go by group chats and things like that, and ‘Ricey’ spoke to the Fermanagh Herald about it.

“I haven’t been chatting to the lads who left.

“They’ve left anyway and they were established players and you just have to get on with things. Things should be well-settled by the team we get back to training and there’ll be loads of other lads there who’ll be mad to get playing.”

He continued: “It’s strange at the moment, everyone’s doing their individual programmes but don’t know when the exact starting date is going to be. It’s hard for the management to properly organise things when they don’t know if it’ll be six or eight weeks or whatever. There’s no group meet-ups anyway. You don’t get seeing many people at the moment.”

Fermanagh will play in the second-tier Tailteann Cup if they fail to win promotion from Division Three this year or reach the Ulster Championship final. There’s been plenty of cynicism about the new ‘B’ championship, but McManus is very much open to the idea.

“In my opinion everyone will still get a fair crack at it, because if you win the provincial championship you still get a chance of playing for the Sam Maguire. This year’s completely up in the air but if you look at the club scene there’s junior, intermediate and senior teams and it works out fine.

“Everyone still gets the chance to aim for a provincial title, and then they’ll have earned the right to play for Sam. It should make things fairer because it won’t lead to as many hammerings – that’s my opinion anyway.”

McManus’s club Teemore are the record championship holders in Fermanagh with 21 titles, the last of which arrived in 2005. Their most famous player is former Fermanagh full-back Barry Owens, who is still doing a job for his club, this time on the edge of the opposition square.

“Barry’s still ridiculously strong, he’s so knowledgeable and plays the game well as a full-forward. It’s great having him in the club, he’s a cult hero in Fermanagh. He has two All-Stars and used to be involved coaching underage teams in the club. It was great growing up with a man like that about the place.”

2020 wasn’t good to Fermanagh – an outbreak of Covid-19 left them depleted before an all-important league match against Clare in the penultimate round and they were duly relegated to Division Three when they didn’t manage to get a result. Their Ulster Championship quarter-final match against Down didn’t go to plan either, even though they were competitive until Caolan Mooney’s goal early in the second-half.

“A couple of things didn’t work out right for us. We missed the boat against Clare, we could’ve come away with at least a draw even though we were down in numbers.

“We played Laois in our last league match, we were relegated at that stage. They came back from five points down and beat us, and that sent Cavan down.

“The Down match didn’t go well for us either. We were still in it at half time but they got the goal and that was a real sucker-punch. It was a bad day, bad weather, bad everything.

“I got the nose broken as well. One of their players was coming through and I stepped across him, whatever way he put his arm out to protect the ball, he clocked me on the nose. I wouldn’t recommend it, it was sore enough for a couple of weeks.”