Ulster SFC: Monaghan joy shows provincial championship's pulse is still beating

The Ulster Football Championship remains alive.......long live the Ulster Championship.

After all the chat about the 'real football' starting when the shiny new Super 16s begin next month, the battle for the Anglo-Celt Cup was in danger of starting to look almost irrelevant after the two opening mismatches which saw Armagh outclass Antrim last weekend and Derry put Saturday's contest against Fermanagh to bed by the 26th minute.

But we didn't reckon on the doughty men of Monaghan who had the Ulster Championship's pulse going strongly again at Healy Park after an astonishing finale as Ryan O'Toole's 76th-minute goal clinched a dramatic 2-17 to 1-18 victory over Tyrone which sent the Farney faithful into raptures.

It was an incredible turnaround after the Red Hands had looked in firm control as half-time after Darragh Canavan's 1-4 had helped them go in 1-10 to 0-8 ahead.

Championship debutant O'Toole's goal was one of those rare moments in high-level, modern day sport when someone truly goes for broke, and seems prepared to suffer the possible consequences of failure, instead of playing the percentages.

Playing those percentages would have involved the Scotstown's 23-year-old fisting the equalising point which 999 out of 1,000 players in that situation probably would have done.

But instead O'Toole fired low and underneath Niall Morgan into the onion bag after a perfectly-weighted Kieran Duffy pass had released him to cut inside from the right flank.

'I just said I'm going to go for this' - O'Toole

Afterwards, O'Toole laughed that a few people had told him that he had been out of his mind in going for goal.

In the BBC Sport NI studio, Oisin McConville wondered whether O'Toole even had realised that Monaghan were only one point in arrears when he sized up his options, but the Farney hero insisted afterwards that he knew the score.

"You kind of have to live in the moment a wee bit and I just said, 'I'm going to go for this'," added the Monaghan matchwinner.

It seems almost churlish to consider what might have been reaction in Monaghan, and indeed elsewhere, had Niall Morgan or Cormac Munroe managed to block O'Toole's shot, which the keeper was inches away from doing as the ball went through his legs.

But instead we had the sight of Monaghan manager Vinny Corey ecstatically punching the air on the sideline as the Farney men finished the job on this occasion after going so close to overturning a five-point interval deficit in the 2021 Ulster Final against the Red Hands at Croke Park.

Conor McManus was the man who had the ball in his hands when referee Niall Cullen blew the final whistle and he kicked the ball skywards amid joy after a game when inevitably his nine points had been crucial to the Farney men's victory.

Asked about those who had given the last rites to the Ulster Championship, the 35-year-old Clontibret man replied: "Ulster's a wee bit different. You only had to see that game to see what it meant to both teams. Both teams were really going at it in the second half."

His fellow club-man Corey, who scored Monaghan's goal on their last Ulster SFC win over Tyrone at the same Healy Park venue five years ago, said the main message to the players at half-time had been to "up the intensity".

"In the first half we looked a bit flat at times and even standoffish but listen the boys were good at half-time.

"The very simple one was intensity. We didn't think we had brought enough of that in the first half.

"But we got a good foothold in the second half and we went at them at pace. We defended really well which maybe we weren't doing in the first half."

Such was the turnaround, that the Farneymen were suddenly ahead for the first time in the 56th minute after Stephen O'Hanlon cut inside Conor Meyler before blasting their first goal past Morgan.

"I got a step on Conor Meyler for probably the first time in the game," said O'Hanlon afterwards.

And while a Shane Carey point then edged Monaghan two up by the 60th minute, Tyrone cancelled out Farney leads on four subsequent occasions in a frantic finale before a Darren McCurry point in the 75th minute seemed to have finally subdued Corey's side.

Corey claimed that he would "probably have been disappointed to go to extra-time" even though he surely would have taken it after McCurry hit Tyrone's last score, with only seconds remaining.

"We thought we had wrestled momentum back in our favour and we didn't want to let that go again," added the Monaghan boss of the period following O'Hanlon's goal.

Monaghan will study Derry 'over next two weeks'

Looking ahead to two weeks and a second successive provincial semi-final tussle with Derry, Corey insisted that "it's a great game for us to get".

Corey was part of Seamus McEnaney's backroom team last year when Monaghan's approach against the eventual provincial champions made some pundits wonder whether much attention had been paid to Derry's tactics in their humbling of then All-Ireland champions Tyrone a couple of weeks earlier.

The Monaghan boss appears unlikely to make the same mistake a year on.

"It's going to be a tough game. We played them last year and they got the upper hand. It's a great game for us to get.

"We're going to learn a lot from the game and learn an awful lot in the next two weeks looking at them."