By John Harrington

Conor McManus is allergic to the theory that the Monaghan footballers punched above their weight in this year’s All-Ireland Senior Football Championship.

He’s heard it said a lot this year, and it strikes him as a condescension rather than a compliment when Monaghan are painted as plucky little giant-killers.

Monaghan might be one of the least populous counties in the country, but McManus doesn’t see why that should be any barrier to success.

And he doesn’t view their run to this year’s All-Ireland semi-final as an overachievement, instead he regards it as a failure that they didn’t go all the way to the Final itself.

“People are always saying that, 'punching above your weight', but it's nearly condescending,” McManus told GAA.ie

“Are you supposed to just stay in Division Three or Four for the rest of your life and just let everybody else at it?

“Are we supposed to not try, and not train hard, and not work to better ourselves. It's as if people expect you to stay down there and be done with.

“We've been in Division 1 now for the last four or five years and on an upward curve, we've won a couple of Ulster titles.

“We're competing for All-Ireland Quarter-Finals, Semi-Finals for the last number of years and we feel that's where we belong.

“For people to come along and say you don't really belong there or you're doing well to be there and saying well done for coming this far, we'd actually be disappointed by how the year has ended.

“That's the reality of it. I suppose that shows you where the county has come from. When Malachy took over we were in Division Three and we had to fight our way back out of it.

“The big thing now for Monaghan is that we see the improvements that have been made this year and we work on them and try to drive it on again.”

Monaghan are proving that if you have your house in order at all levels of the game then you can challenge for the biggest prizes of all no matter how relatively shallow your playing resources are.

Their programme of club matches is run off smoothly every year and their coaching and development structures are top-notch. That perhaps explains why they’re producing such a high number of talented footballers per capita.

“You have to have quality, first and foremost, and there's no doubt that we have quality players in Monaghan,” said McManus.

“That's the starting base for anybody. Then when you have the structures in place and good people behind you and we have a good county board. Michael McMahon, our chairman, has been excellent for Monaghan, as was Padraig Sherry before him.

“We have good people in the background and good development squads and structures going on there as well.

“But we've quality footballers in Monaghan and people maybe tend to overlook that at times. We wouldn't we where we were this year if we didn't have quality footballers, that's the reality of it.

“It’s fair to say we've been improving. If you look back over the past five or six years we've gotten better each year and maybe at times we didn't show that, but we would always have felt we were getting better and adding another layer or two of performance all the time.

“I think this year it's been as well as we have played. There's no guarantees in football, but you'd hope that you could bring that on and improve further on that again next year.”

Retaining Malachy O’Rourke as manager will be key to any further improvement in the short-term, and McManus is hopeful he’ll be persuaded to stay on for a seventh successive season.

“We would be very much hopeful that there's no changes in any shape or form and we can keep everybody involved,” said McManus.

“Malachy has been brilliant for us, second to none. So we'd be very much looking forward to keeping him on for next year.”