Sport bends towards the light.
All the hand-wringing, all the static, it all falls away in the face of a tight game and a big crowd and young lad on his championship debut saying to hell with it.
When Monaghan wing-back Ryan O’Toole zipped in behind the Tyrone cover in the 76th minute of a cracking Ulster quarter-final and scudded his low shot past Niall Morgan, Healy Park shook to its foundations. Everything else is noise.
Monaghan came away from Omagh with a 2-17 to 1-18 victory, just reward for a thrilling second-half fightback after looking thoroughly outmatched before the break.
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Conor McManus, making his 60th successive championship start, scored nine points from nine shots and Monaghan only missed three kicks at goal all day.
Tyrone, who had been so impressive in the opening skirmishes, looked increasingly wan and jittery as the match wore on, constantly turning down shooting opportunities and allowing their visitors to grow in stature. They looked to have dug it out late on, only for O’Toole to take his goal when a fisted point was the more obvious play.
“A couple of great runs coming in from the others drew the defenders away and I came wide and cut in and the ball came over the top to me,” a delighted O’Toole said afterwards.
“As it was coming over I was maybe thinking about taking the point but once I was one-on-one with Niall, I saw it was too good an opportunity not to have a go at it.”
And maybe that’s going to be the way of it. Maybe the upside of everyone dismissing the provincial championships is going to be a freeing up, a loosening out of the vibe.
Had O’Toole missed, the worst that would have happened to Monaghan was a five-week break until the Sam Maguire group stage. There were plenty on the pitch just then – on both sides – who’d have taken that ahead of another two periods of extra-time.
Most likely, of course, it was just the enthusiasm of a 23-year-old who’d stitched a goal against Mayo cutting in from the right in his last game and who fancied himself to do it again. And very probably all this loosey-goosey Ulster football entertainment will only last until Monaghan meet Derry in the next round.
But for here and for now, this was fun. Tyrone learned some things, Monaghan learned some things, everybody had a grand day out.
“[Derry] is a great game for us to get at this stage,” said Monaghan manager Vinny Corey afterwards.
“We have a few young players making their first starts. It’s a great game for us to get because Derry are a well-oiled machine and for us to be looking at them for the next two weeks and playing that match and learning from it as much as we can, that will be massive for us later on in the year.
“We give the Ulster championship the full respect. Today was a quarter-final of an Ulster championship and we were disappointed with our intensity – we didn’t think we brought an Ulster championship intensity to that first half. But we did in the second half.
“And we know we will have to do it again in an Ulster semi-final or we’re not going to get by. The learning we will take from it will be massive but the reality is that there’s another competition, a bigger competition coming down the tracks. You’re preparing for that all the time.”
For Tyrone, it was the kind of lesson they’re better off learning now than in late June or July. Leading 1-10 to 0-8 at the break, they had Monaghan on a standing eight count but failed to get inside to finish the job.
They only managed three points in 30 minutes either side of half-time and had no answer to Monaghan’s hard-running approach to the second half. They gave a sucker an even break and paid for it in the end. It’ll be for nothing if they let it happen again down the line.
“Hindsight is a great thing,” said Brian Dooher afterwards.
“But I’m not sure if we’d do much different. We’d maybe do a thing or two different here or there but I thought in the second half we just invited runners onto us too much. Once that was happening we were always chasing people down. They got the upper hand and were away in front and left us on the back foot and left our defence exposed.
“We never got our own momentum back on track and whenever we did get a wee bit of momentum in the second half we could never get things strung together or scores strung together. It was fractured but we’ll look at it and learn from it. If we take learnings from it, it’s not fatal.”
