Armagh and the odds are stacked against Fermanagh but Darragh McGurn hoping for first Ulster Championship victory
DARRAGH McGurn is 27 now and he’s been playing for Fermanagh since 2019 but he still hasn’t tasted victory in an Ulster Championship game.Memories of last year against Down still hurt – so close and yet...With eight minutes to go in the quarter-final, Fermanagh held a very healthy seven-point lead but the mood changed and momentum swung in Brewster Park when Daniel Guinness nailed a two-pointer for the Mournemen.He wasn’t finished there.A couple of minutes later, Guinness picked up the ball on the edge of the 40m arc and went on a mazy run through the exhausted Fermanagh defence before slashing a right-foot shot into the net. With the rug pulled from under their feet, Fermanagh couldn’t hold on and Down won a thriller with a Ryan McEvoy goal at the death. “It was a gut-wrenching defeat,” says McGurn who scored two points from midfield that day. “Yeah, a tough one to take.“I still haven’t won a game in Ulster and that’s the defeat that hurt the most in my career as a Fermanagh player. You don’t win too many Ulster Championship games and that would have been the first, a monkey off the back nearly.“The manner we lost that game… It was really tough so it gives us a bit of fuel this year that we have something to prove as well. Getting a result in Ulster would mean a lot to us.”Will his first win come this weekend? Unfortunately for McGurn and his team-mates, the odds are stacked against them as Armagh come to Enniskillen on Saturday with Division One pedigree and victory over Tyrone behind them.“It doesn’t get any easier,” says McGurn.“The challenge in Ulster is always going to be there. “We’re looking forward to the challenge and you want to be playing against the top teams in Ulster.”Darragh McGurn made his debut for Fermanagh in 2019 THE challenge ahead of the Ernemen looks all the more daunting because they have no form behind them and were relegated to Division Four with a single win out of seven games. There were several near-misses too but, despite the efforts of McGurn, Garvan Jones and Conor Love, Fermanagh weren’t able to post the totals they needed for survival and only Monaghan (118) and Waterford (bottom of Division Four with 108 points) managed less than the Ernemen’s scoring aggregate of 119 points.“We started off the league campaign with a couple of defeats and it got more and more difficult to turn it around,” popular GAA coach McGurn explained.“We expected to win the first game against Wexford at home so losing it was a bit of a sucker punch. Performances in games we felt were good, it was execution in front of the posts that was letting us down and we struggled to get that up to the point where we could get the results we needed. “It was frustrating, especially as a forward myself. We were all trying to figure out ways we could improve because it definitely wasn’t the case that everything was poor and we were just getting bad results. “We knew that if certain things clicked we would have won a lot of those games so it was disappointing that it didn’t - the last place we wanted to be going into next year was in Division Four.“It’s done now and huge learning have to be taken going into the championship.”Relegation was obviously not the start Declan Bonner would have hoped for as manager. The Donegal native replaced Kieran Donnelly after he stepped down at the end of last season and with a line drawn over the league, he’ll hope to bring his experience to bear in this championship campaign.“He’s brilliant,” says McGurn of the former Erne Gaels manager from the Rosses.“He challenges you day-in, day-out. He sets a standard that you have to meet. He’s been around, he’s won the Ulster Championship with Donegal so he knows what it takes.“He knows Fermanagh inside out as well and he’s raised the standards for a lot of boys but results just haven’t gone our way. It’s easy for people to look in and blame it on this, that or the other but we’re happy with that (management) side of things.”Bonner, who guided Donegal to the Anglo-Celt in 2018 and 2019, has inherited a side that had been shorn of experienced after the retirement of several quality campaigners in Eoin Donnelly, Aidan Breen, the Cullen brother Che and Lee and Ryan Lyons. Che Cullen and his brother Lee retired from county football at the end of last season. Picture by Adrian Donohoe All have been missed and McGurn says he and his team-mates did whatever they could to try and keep them on board.“You’re trying to have that conversation to talk them out of retiring and we did our best because you don’t want to lose players of that quality,” he said.“Losing the two Cullens was huge in terms of the defence – you don’t really replace those two men. The size of them… They’re two man-markers and they were a serious presence in the team. “We didn’t camp outside their front door to get them to stay - I’d be afraid of them two boys, I wouldn’t want to push them too much! It’s one of those things, when boys have made their decision there’s not that much you can do about it. “We lost Ryan Lyons as well but I wouldn’t say we’re in transition because a lot of the boys who have come through are now 23-24, I’m 27 and I’m nearly one of the older fellas in the team which is a bit mad.“We know that with the squad we have if we can get players fit and on the pitch we can compete with most teams.”
