FOR Fermanagh's centre half-back, James McMahon, the howls of criticism directed at he and his team-mates for their style of play has become less distracting as his years as a county player have added up.
Sitting at the Fermanagh press night he is a man, and a player, completely at ease with where both he and his team are.
As he says this Fermanagh squad know exactly who they are.
This Sunday they welcome Donegal to Brewster Park for a repeat of last year’s Ulster final that saw the Erne dream of a first provincial crown disappear thanks to two first half goals from Declan Bonner’s men.
“It was tough on my mum and dad. I knew I was self-destructing. And I also knew the next phase of that, if I had carried on, it was not being here. I was in a very dark place...” - the life and times of Caolan Mooney
‘If you’re still in it when the Christmas tree is up then you’re not going too badly’ - Tommy Coleman’s minors striving for more Clann Eireann success
But McMahon is keen to stress that Fermanagh are not as far away from the top teams popular opinion would hold.
“We consider ourselves to be very close to being a very good, consistent team and having the ability to compete on any day against the division one sides,'' he declared
“But we also know we haven’t proved that consistently yet and the challenge to us is to go out there and bridge that gap.
“The big thing that separates the really top teams from the rest is their conversion rate.
“For the top sides it is consistently high and they also always punish you off a turnover and then keep you penned in, those few things are what separate the top three or four sides and the next group of teams and those are the things that we have to get better at.”
This year the common analysis has Donegal as a more inexperienced team than last season but McMahon is under no illusion that the visitors come packing quite a punch.
“When the Championship comes around the first thing you look for is a home draw and every county is the same. But Donegal are Donegal,'' he states.
“They have a lot of experience but also a lot of very good young players and we saw how they performed in the latter stages of the league and we also know the task that is ahead of us.”
Fermanagh got the better of Donegal in the league when the two sides met this season but after that game their fortunes went in opposite directions as back to back defeats in their last two games saw Fermanagh lose out on promotion while Donegal’s late surge of wins secured a spot back in division one.
“I think the way we ended the league was a bit of a sour note to be honest,'' added McMahon
“We would be very disappointed with how we played against both Meath and Armagh when we had put ourselves in a position to get promotion.
“There would have been very few outside the camp who would have thought that we would have been in with a chance of promotion coming into those last two games.
“It is a case of looking at some of the positives from our earlier games while also learning from those last two games where we didn’t play well,” McMahon said before reflecting on the encounter with Donegal in the league, and also in the Ulster final last season.
“The league game with Donegal was very important in its own right because it consolidated our position in division two which was very important to us this year,'' he stated.
“But they have so many experienced players to come back into the team, so we are not reading too much into that game.
“The Ulster final last year we felt that we underperformed on the day, but we still feel that the score line does not reflect the way the game went either.
“But we know the areas that we have to tidy up on and we are working hard to do that.”
Fermanagh’s perceived negative style of play has come in for heavy criticism from some quarters. McMahon believes the criticism is unfair but he reveals that he has got to the stage in his career where he doesn’t care what those outside the group think: “People say what they want to say about us.
“I don’t really listen to it to be honest. Maybe early days as a county player I would have maybe seen a headline or someone saying something and thought, 'are we really like that?', but now I don’t pay any attention to it.
“We know what we are trying to do. We have created a lot of chances in a lot of games, in some games we took them and in others we didn’t, and we know we have to get better at being more consistent, but we are perfectly happy with the way we play.”
McMahon went to argue that Fermanagh are not as far away from the top teams popular opinion would hold.
“We consider ourselves to be very close to being a very good consistent team and having the ability to compete on any day against the division one sides,'' he declared
“But we also know we haven’t proved that consistently yet and the challenge to us is to go out there and bridge that gap.
“The big thing that separates the really top teams from the rest is their conversion rate.
“For the top sides it is consistently high and they also always punish you off a turnover and then keep you penned in, those few things are what separate the top three or four sides and the next group of teams and those are the things that we have to get better at.”
