In his long career in the intercounty management, Seamus 'Banty' McEnaney developed the reputation as being a maverick.
He was recently lifted the lid on what would have been his greatest masterstroke in management; a wheeler-dealer move that Harry Redknapp would have been proud of.
Flashback to 2007. Banty's most successful run in intercounty management probably came around that 2007 season, when he lead to his native Monaghan to the Ulster final. They'd push eventual All-Ireland champions Kerry to the limit in Croke Park in the All-Ireland quarterfinal as well that summer. While he oversaw a brilliant Monaghan team with cult heroes like Tommy Freeman and Vinny Corry, that Monaghan team did lack firepower up front.
While Banty would hand a senior debut to a 19-year-old Conor McManus that summer, he was also on the lookout for more established talent to bolster Monaghan's forward corps, even if that meant looking outside the county.
Speaking to the Farney Army podcast in a two-part podcast, Banty says he approached two of the best forwards of the decade - Padráic Joyce and Ciarán McDonald - about transferring to Monaghan.
As Banty tells it, both men heard him out, and weighed up their options.
“At the end of 2007, I remember I felt we needed a centre-forward. I went looking for Padraic Joyce, believe it or not, because he was married to a Monaghan woman. You know what, and this is a secret out of school, he would have come to me but he wanted to play with his club so he couldn’t come to Monaghan because he was a Galway man and not...he had to play club football in Monaghan. He wouldn’t leave his own club, which you have to respect him for.
“The other man I tried for in 2008, I met him twice and he wouldn’t come, was Ciaran McDonald. He was working in Navan. Those are two secrets that never came out. Again, he wouldn’t shift. I felt if we had one man who could control the forward unit in ‘07, ‘08, ‘09 and ‘10, from centre-forward, that would have been the link in the chain.”
Make of this what you will. Both McDonald and Joyce were icons of 2000s football and both were in the twilights of their intercounty careers in late 2007. Still it's impossible to imagine either in county colours other than the ones we know them for. There's no transfer market in intercounty GAA, but if there was, perhaps Monaghan would have won an All-Ireland in the late 2000s.
