IT was getting on for half seven when Ryan Wylie finally found a slot in his hectic schedule to reflect upon the rollercoaster campaign that leads Monaghan towards a sure to be sold-out showdown with the Dubs on Saturday.
Between work and football, opportunities to come up for air have been increasingly rare in recent times. Around the same period as the Farney’s round-robin series got under way in Celtic Park on May 27, Wylie took up a new post at Dublin’s Mater hospital.
The time between feels like a blur, five Championship outings coming and going in the space of six high-octane weeks – pain, penalties, draws and no end of at-the-death drama littering the road, at the end of which Monaghan still stand defiant, a first All-Ireland semi-final since 2018 the reward for grit, guts and big game smarts.
A sandwich is hastily consumed while Wylie beats a path from his house in Dublin to home in Ballybay on Friday night. Monaghan will train the following morning, a week out from their date with destiny, before joining the Farney exodus to the Athletic Grounds for Sunday’s All-Ireland minor decider.
It may not have gone their way, but the feel-good factor that flows the length and breadth of the county cannot be quelled. These are high times, and they know it.
“Last year it was the June Bank Holiday and we were gone from the Championship.
“To have games going into July, going into the latter part of the Championship, that’s a great thing. All those Thursday nights before a game, jeez you’re just hoping it’s not the last night you’re down there.
“You just want to keep extending it on and on…”
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Maybe it’s because he’s 29 now, long gone the young lad straight in from minors, that the smaller details seem to matter more once the dust settles on the biggest days.
Beating Ulster rivals Armagh on penalties ensured the year rolls on, the scenes of celebration that greeted Rory Beggan’s second penalty save from Callum Cumiskey eclipsing all that went before as summer stretched out before them.
There was a time when the grander significance might have washed over Wylie. Big brother Drew was always there for the chat before and after, easing passage into the fold during those early years, but now he has gone. So too Colin Walshe, and that’s just this year.
Before them Dessie Mone exited stage left, Dermot Malone, Owen Duffy, Dick Clerkin, Eoin Lennon, Paul Finlay, Vinny Corey, the man who leads the mission from the front nowadays. The list goes on.
Looking around at Darren Hughes, Kieran Duffy, Karl O’Connell, Conor McManus, their super-human efforts continue to stir the soul, but nothing lasts forever. Monaghan, more than at any other time, are living the moment.
“Them lads gave it everything, and there’s a lot of men soldiered a long time for Monaghan and never got to an All-Ireland semi-final, or never won an Ulster Championship.
“It’s not that you feel sorry for them as such, but you feel grateful for where you’ve got. That’s why you don’t want to stop here.
“In 2018, it was sort of like ‘this is great now, we’ve got over that barrier and finally reached a semi-final – this’ll happen more often’. We’ve been going in every year and just haven’t got back there.
“You have to realise that these are good times - even going back home with the lads on the bus, the craic… you have a lot of days going home on the bus from Croke Park and there’s nothing but silence.”
With Drew, who called time back in January, it is a unique dynamic.
The pair were central figures when Ballybay ended a decade-long wait for county championship glory last year, having lived and breathed the good days and the bad with Monaghan throughout the same period.
Although not pitched against each other directly, the Wylie brothers were vying for starting spots in an increasingly competitive defensive unit as momentum gathered pace under Malachy O’Rourke. Sibling rivalry, though, was never a concern.
And travelling that road alone? It has taken time to get used to.
“It was strange alright,” says Ryan.
“When any of those sort of lads leave the dressing room, it definitely is weird, and then when it’s your own brother it brings a different sense… like, when you’re playing with Drew, you don’t really pass any remarks at the time.
“It’s maybe moreso for your mother or father to sort of think about it, but then when you’re gone you realise how good it was to have him there, to be heading off to games together. It’s probably tough for him now at the minute… that’s just sport.
“It never really dawned on me when we were going over to training that I need to get the better of him or anything like that. He’s a completely different player to me - some of the things he was able to do, I wish I had in my locker.”
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Based in Dublin since starting studies at UCD in 2011, Wylie has become used to operating at a distance. Working within the Mater’s radiology department in the midst of Covid-19 madness, the distinction between life and sport could hardly have been more stark.
Any opportunity to meet the boys or get up the road to training was pure release. There were friends in the capital too, of course - some of whom he will cross swords with once the ball is thrown in at 5.30pm on Saturday.
Brian Fenton, Colm Basquel and Eoin Murchan are all familiar faces on the scene, while Jack McCaffrey, Paul Mannion and Michael Fitzsimons were part of the same 2016 Sigerson Cup-winning side as Wylie.
The following August Wylie would wind up marking Mannion when Dublin blew Monaghan away in the counties’ last Championship meeting, the Kilmacud Croke’s ace scoring three from play as Jim Gavin’s juggernaut ran out easy 11-point winners in the 2017 All-Ireland quarter-final.
But by the end of the year football had been placed to the side as Wylie and Mannion were part of a travelling party sailing down the Panama canal past the beautiful San Blas islands, into Colombia, all part of an unforgettable winter trip.
The pair eventually returned home with their hair dyed an eye-catching platinum blond, though Dublin’s team holiday to Florida and the Bahamas meant Mannion was unable to journey on to Vietnam and the Philippines.
Needless to say, those magic memories will be well and truly parked when battle commences this weekend. Yet, despite the exhausting endeavours of the Armagh game the previous evening, Wylie couldn’t resist making the short walk to Croke Park to run the rule over the Farney’s next opponents.
He had a feeling Dublin would have too much for Mayo – and his gut was right.
“I live on Clonliffe Road so it’s nearly handier just to go into the games because you maybe hear the cheers before you see what’s happened when you’re watching on the TV.
“That stage at the start of the second half when they completely blitzed Mayo, I’ve been on the receiving end of that a couple of times with Dublin so I know what it feels like.
“That’s what they can do to you. If they get on top and smell blood, they’ll do that to you. It’s our job to limit that as much as possible and get our own stamp on the game and not allow that to happen.
“Once you go seven points behind against Dublin with seven, eight minutes of the second half gone, they just picked Mayo off at their will. It’s not a good place to be.”
Off the back of that second 35, Dessie Farrell’s men go in as 1/8 favourites with the bookies. Would that have been the case were they coming up against Armagh? Monaghan need no more fuel for their fire, but there is plenty there if they wanted.
Let’s start with The Sunday Game the night after Monaghan’s heroics, when their quarter-final was the last to be covered. The tone of the analysis also stuck in the craw – too much where the Orchard went wrong, too little credit for the winners.
Dick Clerkin took up the cudgels in his Irish Independent column, questioning some of the condescending commentary that surrounded the county’s run to the final four, while on RTE’s GAA podcast, Tyrone All-Ireland winner Enda McGinley insisted Monaghan “have to show they hate this thing about being patted on the back for how well they’ve done with small numbers”.
The noise can be drowned out to a certain extent, but it hasn’t escaped the players’ attention entirely.
“I don’t watch The Sunday Game, I don’t read the papers, I don’t listen to podcasts,” said Wylie, “but I suppose when it’s being talked about you’re going to get wind of it one way or another.
“People are still talking about the population… I don’t think anybody knows the exact population any more. It’s getting smaller and smaller every time I hear the story - it’ll soon be only the 15 players who live there.
“Look I don’t take much heed of it. The more you feed into that, the more you might get annoyed by it, and I don’t really see the point. We deserve to be where we are.
“I know people might get annoyed about it, people maybe say we’re not getting enough exposure, but we have a core group of players the last 10-15 years, a lot of them would get onto a lot of county teams.
“I just think we’ve been lucky in that respect. It doesn’t come by a fluke.”
However, the spectre of the Dubs, before a partisan crowd in Croke Park, presents a different kind of challenge to any Monaghan have faced so far in this year’s Championship.
Coming up against Ulster heavyweights Tyrone, Donegal, Derry or Armagh, only a brave soul would bet against them. But, while former Kerry boss Eamonn Fitzmaurice lauded the Farney “shapeshifters”, talking up the tools that could trouble Dublin, the bookies’ odds reflect the sense that the semi-final represents a step too far.
Wylie has been around the block long enough, watching the Dubs at close enough quarters, to understand where it all comes from. The odd League result over the years might be thrown up as evidence of what is possible, but he knows now is when they have to make it count on the biggest stage.
“We lost Championship games to Dublin in 2014 and 2017… even that 2017 game, in the League games we had run them close before that, but you saw the difference between a Dublin Championship team and a Dublin League team.
“We met that Dublin team in their prime, it was going to be very tough. You see them there at the minute, they’re playing great stuff, so there’s no point us going in and saying we’ll do this or we’ll do that. Some of their players have eight All-Irelands, part of the six in-a-row team, you have to give them the respect they deserve.
“We are in a semi-final, and we definitely have to believe we can win it. Whatever is said outside, everybody has their point of view - they’re only speaking with what they’ve seen in the past and they have to go off that.
“You can’t really blame people for saying what they’ve been saying. That’s just something we’re going to be trying to turn around.”
